We use the maximum a posteriori estimation principle for learning representations distributed on the unit sphere. We propose to use the angular Gaussian distribution, which corresponds to a Gaussian projected on the unit-sphere and derive the associated loss function. We also consider the von Mises-Fisher distribution, which is the conditional of a Gaussian in the unit-sphere. The learned representations are pushed toward fixed directions, which are the prior means of the Gaussians; allowing for a learning strategy that is resilient to data drift. This makes it suitable for online continual learning, which is the problem of training neural networks on a continuous data stream, where multiple classification tasks are presented sequentially so that data from past tasks are no longer accessible, and data from the current task can be seen only once. To address this challenging scenario, we propose a memory-based representation learning technique equipped with our new loss functions. Our approach does not require negative data or knowledge of task boundaries and performs well with smaller batch sizes while being computationally efficient. We demonstrate with extensive experiments that the proposed method outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods on both standard evaluation scenarios and realistic scenarios with blurry task boundaries. For reproducibility, we use the same training pipeline for every compared method and share the code at https://t.ly/SQTj.  ( 3 min )

We show that the canonical approach for training differentially private GANs -- updating the discriminator with differentially private stochastic gradient descent (DPSGD) -- can yield significantly improved results after modifications to training. Specifically, we propose that existing instantiations of this approach neglect to consider how adding noise only to discriminator updates inhibits discriminator training, disrupting the balance between the generator and discriminator necessary for successful GAN training. We show that a simple fix -- taking more discriminator steps between generator steps -- restores parity between the generator and discriminator and improves results. Additionally, with the goal of restoring parity, we experiment with other modifications -- namely, large batch sizes and adaptive discriminator update frequency -- to improve discriminator training and see further improvements in generation quality. Our results demonstrate that on standard image synthesis benchmarks, DPSGD outperforms all alternative GAN privatization schemes. Code: https://github.com/alexbie98/dpgan-revisit.  ( 2 min )

The growth of Graph Convolution Network (GCN) model sizes has revolutionized numerous applications, surpassing human performance in areas such as personal healthcare and financial systems. The deployment of GCNs in the cloud raises privacy concerns due to potential adversarial attacks on client data. To address security concerns, Privacy-Preserving Machine Learning (PPML) using Homomorphic Encryption (HE) secures sensitive client data. However, it introduces substantial computational overhead in practical applications. To tackle those challenges, we present LinGCN, a framework designed to reduce multiplication depth and optimize the performance of HE based GCN inference. LinGCN is structured around three key elements: (1) A differentiable structural linearization algorithm, complemented by a parameterized discrete indicator function, co-trained with model weights to meet the optimization goal. This strategy promotes fine-grained node-level non-linear location selection, resulting in a model with minimized multiplication depth. (2) A compact node-wise polynomial replacement policy with a second-order trainable activation function, steered towards superior convergence by a two-level distillation approach from an all-ReLU based teacher model. (3) an enhanced HE solution that enables finer-grained operator fusion for node-wise activation functions, further reducing multiplication level consumption in HE-based inference. Our experiments on the NTU-XVIEW skeleton joint dataset reveal that LinGCN excels in latency, accuracy, and scalability for homomorphically encrypted inference, outperforming solutions such as CryptoGCN. Remarkably, LinGCN achieves a 14.2x latency speedup relative to CryptoGCN, while preserving an inference accuracy of 75% and notably reducing multiplication depth.  ( 3 min )

Greedy layer-wise or module-wise training of neural networks is compelling in constrained and on-device settings where memory is limited, as it circumvents a number of problems of end-to-end back-propagation. However, it suffers from a stagnation problem, whereby early layers overfit and deeper layers stop increasing the test accuracy after a certain depth. We propose to solve this issue by introducing a module-wise regularization inspired by the minimizing movement scheme for gradient flows in distribution space. We call the method TRGL for Transport Regularized Greedy Learning and study it theoretically, proving that it leads to greedy modules that are regular and that progressively solve the task. Experimentally, we show improved accuracy of module-wise training of various architectures such as ResNets, Transformers and VGG, when our regularization is added, superior to that of other module-wise training methods and often to end-to-end training, with as much as 60% less memory usage.  ( 2 min )

We consider the problem of learning a graph under the Laplacian constraint with a non-convex penalty: minimax concave penalty (MCP). For solving the MCP penalized graphical model, we design an inexact proximal difference-of-convex algorithm (DCA) and prove its convergence to critical points. We note that each subproblem of the proximal DCA enjoys the nice property that the objective function in its dual problem is continuously differentiable with a semismooth gradient. Therefore, we apply an efficient semismooth Newton method to subproblems of the proximal DCA. Numerical experiments on various synthetic and real data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the non-convex penalty MCP in promoting sparsity. Compared with the existing state-of-the-art method, our method is demonstrated to be more efficient and reliable for learning graph Laplacian with MCP.  ( 2 min )

Latent space Energy-Based Models (EBMs), also known as energy-based priors, have drawn growing interests in generative modeling. Fueled by its flexibility in the formulation and strong modeling power of the latent space, recent works built upon it have made interesting attempts aiming at the interpretability of text modeling. However, latent space EBMs also inherit some flaws from EBMs in data space; the degenerate MCMC sampling quality in practice can lead to poor generation quality and instability in training, especially on data with complex latent structures. Inspired by the recent efforts that leverage diffusion recovery likelihood learning as a cure for the sampling issue, we introduce a novel symbiosis between the diffusion models and latent space EBMs in a variational learning framework, coined as the latent diffusion energy-based model. We develop a geometric clustering-based regularization jointly with the information bottleneck to further improve the quality of the learned latent space. Experiments on several challenging tasks demonstrate the superior performance of our model on interpretable text modeling over strong counterparts.  ( 2 min )

Continual learning is a desirable feature in many modern machine learning applications, which allows in-field adaptation and updating, ranging from accommodating distribution shift, to fine-tuning, and to learning new tasks. For applications with privacy and low latency requirements, the compute and memory demands imposed by continual learning can be cost-prohibitive for resource-constraint edge platforms. Reducing computational precision through fully quantized training (FQT) simultaneously reduces memory footprint and increases compute efficiency for both training and inference. However, aggressive quantization especially integer FQT typically degrades model accuracy to unacceptable levels. In this paper, we propose a technique that leverages inexpensive Hadamard transforms to enable low-precision training with only integer matrix multiplications. We further determine which tensors need stochastic rounding and propose tiled matrix multiplication to enable low-bit width accumulators. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique on several human activity recognition datasets and CIFAR100 in a class incremental learning setting. We achieve less than 0.5% and 3% accuracy degradation while we quantize all matrix multiplications inputs down to 4-bits with 8-bit accumulators.  ( 2 min )

It is a crucial challenge to reconstruct population dynamics using unlabeled samples from distributions at coarse time intervals. Recent approaches such as flow-based models or Schr\"odinger Bridge (SB) models have demonstrated appealing performance, yet the inferred sample trajectories either fail to account for the underlying stochasticity or are $\underline{D}$eep $\underline{M}$omentum Multi-Marginal $\underline{S}$chr\"odinger $\underline{B}$ridge(DMSB), a novel computational framework that learns the smooth measure-valued spline for stochastic systems that satisfy position marginal constraints across time. By tailoring the celebrated Bregman Iteration and extending the Iteration Proportional Fitting to phase space, we manage to handle high-dimensional multi-marginal trajectory inference tasks efficiently. Our algorithm outperforms baselines significantly, as evidenced by experiments for synthetic datasets and a real-world single-cell RNA sequence dataset. Additionally, the proposed approach can reasonably reconstruct the evolution of velocity distribution, from position snapshots only, when there is a ground truth velocity that is nevertheless inaccessible.  ( 2 min )

We present a simple but effective method to measure and mitigate model biases caused by reliance on spurious cues. Instead of requiring costly changes to one's data or model training, our method better utilizes the data one already has by sorting them. Specifically, we rank images within their classes based on spuriosity (the degree to which common spurious cues are present), proxied via deep neural features of an interpretable network. With spuriosity rankings, it is easy to identify minority subpopulations (i.e. low spuriosity images) and assess model bias as the gap in accuracy between high and low spuriosity images. One can even efficiently remove a model's bias at little cost to accuracy by finetuning its classification head on low spuriosity images, resulting in fairer treatment of samples regardless of spuriosity. We demonstrate our method on ImageNet, annotating $5000$ class-feature dependencies ($630$ of which we find to be spurious) and generating a dataset of $325k$ soft segmentations for these features along the way. Having computed spuriosity rankings via the identified spurious neural features, we assess biases for $89$ diverse models and find that class-wise biases are highly correlated across models. Our results suggest that model bias due to spurious feature reliance is influenced far more by what the model is trained on than how it is trained.  ( 3 min )

Anomaly detection has recently gained increasing attention in the field of computer vision, likely due to its broad set of applications ranging from product fault detection on industrial production lines and impending event detection in video surveillance to finding lesions in medical scans. Regardless of the domain, anomaly detection is typically framed as a one-class classification task, where the learning is conducted on normal examples only. An entire family of successful anomaly detection methods is based on learning to reconstruct masked normal inputs (e.g. patches, future frames, etc.) and exerting the magnitude of the reconstruction error as an indicator for the abnormality level. Unlike other reconstruction-based methods, we present a novel self-supervised masked convolutional transformer block (SSMCTB) that comprises the reconstruction-based functionality at a core architectural level. The proposed self-supervised block is extremely flexible, enabling information masking at any layer of a neural network and being compatible with a wide range of neural architectures. In this work, we extend our previous self-supervised predictive convolutional attentive block (SSPCAB) with a 3D masked convolutional layer, a transformer for channel-wise attention, as well as a novel self-supervised objective based on Huber loss. Furthermore, we show that our block is applicable to a wider variety of tasks, adding anomaly detection in medical images and thermal videos to the previously considered tasks based on RGB images and surveillance videos. We exhibit the generality and flexibility of SSMCTB by integrating it into multiple state-of-the-art neural models for anomaly detection, bringing forth empirical results that confirm considerable performance improvements on five benchmarks. We release our code and data as open source at: https://github.com/ristea/ssmctb.  ( 3 min )

A robot self-model is a task-agnostic representation of the robot's physical morphology that can be used for motion planning tasks in absence of classical geometric kinematic models. In particular, when the latter are hard to engineer or the robot's kinematics change unexpectedly, human-free self-modeling is a necessary feature of truly autonomous agents. In this work, we leverage neural fields to allow a robot to self-model its kinematics as a neural-implicit query model learned only from 2D images annotated with camera poses and configurations. This enables significantly greater applicability than existing approaches which have been dependent on depth images or geometry knowledge. To this end, alongside a curricular data sampling strategy, we propose a new encoder-based neural density field architecture for dynamic object-centric scenes conditioned on high numbers of degrees of freedom (DOFs). In a 7-DOF robot test setup, the learned self-model achieves a Chamfer-L2 distance of 2% of the robot's workspace dimension. We demonstrate the capabilities of this model on a motion planning task as an exemplary downstream application.  ( 2 min )

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a formal framework for modeling and solving sequential decision-making problems. In finite-time horizons such problems are relevant for instance for optimal stopping or specific supply chain problems, but also in the training of large language models. In contrast to infinite horizon MDPs optimal policies are not stationary, policies must be learned for every single epoch. In practice all parameters are often trained simultaneously, ignoring the inherent structure suggested by dynamic programming. This paper introduces a combination of dynamic programming and policy gradient called dynamic policy gradient, where the parameters are trained backwards in time. For the tabular softmax parametrisation we carry out the convergence analysis for simultaneous and dynamic policy gradient towards global optima, both in the exact and sampled gradient settings without regularisation. It turns out that the use of dynamic policy gradient training much better exploits the structure of finite-time problems which is reflected in improved convergence bounds.  ( 2 min )

High-quality text embedding is pivotal in improving semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks, which are crucial components in Large Language Model (LLM) applications. However, a common challenge existing text embedding models face is the problem of vanishing gradients, primarily due to their reliance on the cosine function in the optimization objective, which has saturation zones. To address this issue, this paper proposes a novel angle-optimized text embedding model called AnglE. The core idea of AnglE is to introduce angle optimization in a complex space. This novel approach effectively mitigates the adverse effects of the saturation zone in the cosine function, which can impede gradient and hinder optimization processes. To set up a comprehensive STS evaluation, we experimented on existing short-text STS datasets and a newly collected long-text STS dataset from GitHub Issues. Furthermore, we examine domain-specific STS scenarios with limited labeled data and explore how AnglE works with LLM-annotated data. Extensive experiments were conducted on various tasks including short-text STS, long-text STS, and domain-specific STS tasks. The results show that AnglE outperforms the state-of-the-art (SOTA) STS models that ignore the cosine saturation zone. These findings demonstrate the ability of AnglE to generate high-quality text embeddings and the usefulness of angle optimization in STS.  ( 2 min )

The recently released GPT-4 Code Interpreter has demonstrated remarkable proficiency in solving challenging math problems, primarily attributed to its ability to seamlessly reason with natural language, generate code, execute code, and continue reasoning based on the execution output. In this paper, we present a method to fine-tune open-source language models, enabling them to use code for modeling and deriving math equations and, consequently, enhancing their mathematical reasoning abilities. We propose a method of generating novel and high-quality datasets with math problems and their code-based solutions, referred to as MathCodeInstruct. Each solution interleaves natural language, code, and execution results. We also introduce a customized supervised fine-tuning and inference approach. This approach yields the MathCoder models, a family of models capable of generating code-based solutions for solving challenging math problems. Impressively, the MathCoder models achieve state-of-the-art scores among open-source LLMs on the MATH (45.2%) and GSM8K (83.9%) datasets, substantially outperforming other open-source alternatives. Notably, the MathCoder model not only surpasses ChatGPT-3.5 and PaLM-2 on GSM8K and MATH but also outperforms GPT-4 on the competition-level MATH dataset. The dataset and models will be released at https://github.com/mathllm/MathCoder.  ( 2 min )

Differentiable logics (DL) have recently been proposed as a method of training neural networks to satisfy logical specifications. A DL consists of a syntax in which specifications are stated and an interpretation function that translates expressions in the syntax into loss functions. These loss functions can then be used during training with standard gradient descent algorithms. The variety of existing DLs and the differing levels of formality with which they are treated makes a systematic comparative study of their properties and implementations difficult. This paper remedies this problem by suggesting a meta-language for defining DLs that we call the Logic of Differentiable Logics, or LDL. Syntactically, it generalises the syntax of existing DLs to FOL, and for the first time introduces the formalism for reasoning about vectors and learners. Semantically, it introduces a general interpretation function that can be instantiated to define loss functions arising from different existing DLs. We use LDL to establish several theoretical properties of existing DLs, and to conduct their empirical study in neural network verification.  ( 2 min )

Reliability of machine learning evaluation -- the consistency of observed evaluation scores across replicated model training runs -- is affected by several sources of nondeterminism which can be regarded as measurement noise. Current tendencies to remove noise in order to enforce reproducibility of research results neglect inherent nondeterminism at the implementation level and disregard crucial interaction effects between algorithmic noise factors and data properties. This limits the scope of conclusions that can be drawn from such experiments. Instead of removing noise, we propose to incorporate several sources of variance, including their interaction with data properties, into an analysis of significance and reliability of machine learning evaluation, with the aim to draw inferences beyond particular instances of trained models. We show how to use linear mixed effects models (LMEMs) to analyze performance evaluation scores, and to conduct statistical inference with a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT). This allows us to incorporate arbitrary sources of noise like meta-parameter variations into statistical significance testing, and to assess performance differences conditional on data properties. Furthermore, a variance component analysis (VCA) enables the analysis of the contribution of noise sources to overall variance and the computation of a reliability coefficient by the ratio of substantial to total variance.  ( 3 min )

Tabular data prediction has been employed in medical applications such as patient health risk prediction. However, existing methods usually revolve around the algorithm design while overlooking the significance of data engineering. Medical tabular datasets frequently exhibit significant heterogeneity across different sources, with limited sample sizes per source. As such, previous predictors are often trained on manually curated small datasets that struggle to generalize across different tabular datasets during inference. This paper proposes to scale medical tabular data predictors (MediTab) to various tabular inputs with varying features. The method uses a data engine that leverages large language models (LLMs) to consolidate tabular samples to overcome the barrier across tables with distinct schema. It also aligns out-domain data with the target task using a "learn, annotate, and refinement" pipeline. The expanded training data then enables the pre-trained MediTab to infer for arbitrary tabular input in the domain without fine-tuning, resulting in significant improvements over supervised baselines: it reaches an average ranking of 1.57 and 1.00 on 7 patient outcome prediction datasets and 3 trial outcome prediction datasets, respectively. In addition, MediTab exhibits impressive zero-shot performances: it outperforms supervised XGBoost models by 8.9% and 17.2% on average in two prediction tasks, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/RyanWangZf/MediTab.  ( 3 min )

The ML community is rapidly exploring techniques for prompting language models (LMs) and for stacking them into pipelines that solve complex tasks. Unfortunately, existing LM pipelines are typically implemented using hard-coded "prompt templates", i.e. lengthy strings discovered via trial and error. Toward a more systematic approach for developing and optimizing LM pipelines, we introduce DSPy, a programming model that abstracts LM pipelines as text transformation graphs, i.e. imperative computational graphs where LMs are invoked through declarative modules. DSPy modules are parameterized, meaning they can learn (by creating and collecting demonstrations) how to apply compositions of prompting, finetuning, augmentation, and reasoning techniques. We design a compiler that will optimize any DSPy pipeline to maximize a given metric. We conduct two case studies, showing that succinct DSPy programs can express and optimize sophisticated LM pipelines that reason about math word problems, tackle multi-hop retrieval, answer complex questions, and control agent loops. Within minutes of compiling, a few lines of DSPy allow GPT-3.5 and llama2-13b-chat to self-bootstrap pipelines that outperform standard few-shot prompting (generally by over 25% and 65%, respectively) and pipelines with expert-created demonstrations (by up to 5-46% and 16-40%, respectively). On top of that, DSPy programs compiled to open and relatively small LMs like 770M-parameter T5 and llama2-13b-chat are competitive with approaches that rely on expert-written prompt chains for proprietary GPT-3.5. DSPy is available at https://github.com/stanfordnlp/dspy  ( 3 min )

Detecting and discovering new gene interactions based on known gene expressions and gene interaction data presents a significant challenge. Various statistical and deep learning methods have attempted to tackle this challenge by leveraging the topological structure of gene interactions and gene expression patterns to predict novel gene interactions. In contrast, some approaches have focused exclusively on utilizing gene expression profiles. In this context, we introduce GENER, a parallel-layer deep learning network designed exclusively for the identification of gene-gene relationships using gene expression data. We conducted two training experiments and compared the performance of our network with that of existing statistical and deep learning approaches. Notably, our model achieved an average AUROC score of 0.834 on the combined BioGRID&DREAM5 dataset, outperforming competing methods in predicting gene-gene interactions.  ( 2 min )

We present two new classes of algorithms for efficient field integration on graphs encoding point clouds. The first class, SeparatorFactorization(SF), leverages the bounded genus of point cloud mesh graphs, while the second class, RFDiffusion(RFD), uses popular epsilon-nearest-neighbor graph representations for point clouds. Both can be viewed as providing the functionality of Fast Multipole Methods (FMMs), which have had a tremendous impact on efficient integration, but for non-Euclidean spaces. We focus on geometries induced by distributions of walk lengths between points (e.g., shortest-path distance). We provide an extensive theoretical analysis of our algorithms, obtaining new results in structural graph theory as a byproduct. We also perform exhaustive empirical evaluation, including on-surface interpolation for rigid and deformable objects (particularly for mesh-dynamics modeling), Wasserstein distance computations for point clouds, and the Gromov-Wasserstein variant.  ( 2 min )

Multimodal learning models have become increasingly important as they surpass single-modality approaches on diverse tasks ranging from question-answering to autonomous driving. Despite the importance of multimodal learning, existing efforts focus on NLP applications, where the number of modalities is typically less than four (audio, video, text, images). However, data inputs in other domains, such as the medical field, may include X-rays, PET scans, MRIs, genetic screening, clinical notes, and more, creating a need for both efficient and accurate information fusion. Many state-of-the-art models rely on pairwise cross-modal attention, which does not scale well for applications with more than three modalities. For $n$ modalities, computing attention will result in $n \choose 2$ operations, potentially requiring considerable amounts of computational resources. To address this, we propose a new domain-neutral attention mechanism, One-Versus-Others (OvO) attention, that scales linearly with the number of modalities and requires only $n$ attention operations, thus offering a significant reduction in computational complexity compared to existing cross-modal attention algorithms. Using three diverse real-world datasets as well as an additional simulation experiment, we show that our method improves performance compared to popular fusion techniques while decreasing computation costs.  ( 2 min )

Federated learning (FL) supports distributed training of a global machine learning model across multiple devices with the help of a central server. However, data heterogeneity across different devices leads to the client model drift issue and results in model performance degradation and poor model fairness. To address the issue, we design Federated learning with global-local Knowledge Fusion (FedKF) scheme in this paper. The key idea in FedKF is to let the server return the global knowledge to be fused with the local knowledge in each training round so that the local model can be regularized towards the global optima. Therefore, the client model drift issue can be mitigated. In FedKF, we first propose the active-inactive model aggregation technique that supports a precise global knowledge representation. Then, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation (KD) approach to enable each client model to learn the global knowledge (embedded in the global model) while each client model can still learn the local knowledge (embedded in the local dataset) simultaneously, thereby realizing the global-local knowledge fusion process. The theoretical analysis and intensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of FedKF over previous solutions.  ( 2 min )

Optimizing large language models (LLMs) for downstream use cases often involves the customization of pre-trained LLMs through further fine-tuning. Meta's open release of Llama models and OpenAI's APIs for fine-tuning GPT-3.5 Turbo on custom datasets also encourage this practice. But, what are the safety costs associated with such custom fine-tuning? We note that while existing safety alignment infrastructures can restrict harmful behaviors of LLMs at inference time, they do not cover safety risks when fine-tuning privileges are extended to end-users. Our red teaming studies find that the safety alignment of LLMs can be compromised by fine-tuning with only a few adversarially designed training examples. For instance, we jailbreak GPT-3.5 Turbo's safety guardrails by fine-tuning it on only 10 such examples at a cost of less than $0.20 via OpenAI's APIs, making the model responsive to nearly any harmful instructions. Disconcertingly, our research also reveals that, even without malicious intent, simply fine-tuning with benign and commonly used datasets can also inadvertently degrade the safety alignment of LLMs, though to a lesser extent. These findings suggest that fine-tuning aligned LLMs introduces new safety risks that current safety infrastructures fall short of addressing -- even if a model's initial safety alignment is impeccable, it is not necessarily to be maintained after custom fine-tuning. We outline and critically analyze potential mitigations and advocate for further research efforts toward reinforcing safety protocols for the custom fine-tuning of aligned LLMs.  ( 3 min )

Oversmoothing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) refers to the phenomenon where increasing network depth leads to homogeneous node representations. While previous work has established that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) exponentially lose expressive power, it remains controversial whether the graph attention mechanism can mitigate oversmoothing. In this work, we provide a definitive answer to this question through a rigorous mathematical analysis, by viewing attention-based GNNs as nonlinear time-varying dynamical systems and incorporating tools and techniques from the theory of products of inhomogeneous matrices and the joint spectral radius. We establish that, contrary to popular belief, the graph attention mechanism cannot prevent oversmoothing and loses expressive power exponentially. The proposed framework extends the existing results on oversmoothing for symmetric GCNs to a significantly broader class of GNN models, including random walk GCNs, Graph Attention Networks (GATs) and (graph) transformers. In particular, our analysis accounts for asymmetric, state-dependent and time-varying aggregation operators and a wide range of common nonlinear activation functions, such as ReLU, LeakyReLU, GELU and SiLU.  ( 2 min )

Unsupervised anomaly segmentation aims to detect patterns that are distinct from any patterns processed during training, commonly called abnormal or out-of-distribution patterns, without providing any associated manual segmentations. Since anomalies during deployment can lead to model failure, detecting the anomaly can enhance the reliability of models, which is valuable in high-risk domains like medical imaging. This paper introduces Masked Modality Cycles with Conditional Diffusion (MMCCD), a method that enables segmentation of anomalies across diverse patterns in multimodal MRI. The method is based on two fundamental ideas. First, we propose the use of cyclic modality translation as a mechanism for enabling abnormality detection. Image-translation models learn tissue-specific modality mappings, which are characteristic of tissue physiology. Thus, these learned mappings fail to translate tissues or image patterns that have never been encountered during training, and the error enables their segmentation. Furthermore, we combine image translation with a masked conditional diffusion model, which attempts to `imagine' what tissue exists under a masked area, further exposing unknown patterns as the generative model fails to recreate them. We evaluate our method on a proxy task by training on healthy-looking slices of BraTS2021 multi-modality MRIs and testing on slices with tumors. We show that our method compares favorably to previous unsupervised approaches based on image reconstruction and denoising with autoencoders and diffusion models.  ( 3 min )

We propose a new gradient descent algorithm with added stochastic terms for finding the global optimizers of nonconvex optimization problems. A key component in the algorithm is the adaptive tuning of the randomness based on the value of the objective function. In the language of simulated annealing, the temperature is state-dependent. With this, we prove the global convergence of the algorithm with an algebraic rate both in probability and in the parameter space. This is a significant improvement over the classical rate from using a more straightforward control of the noise term. The convergence proof is based on the actual discrete setup of the algorithm, not just its continuous limit as often done in the literature. We also present several numerical examples to demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the algorithm for reasonably complex objective functions.  ( 2 min )

Generative models inspired by dynamical transport of measure -- such as flows and diffusions -- construct a continuous-time map between two probability densities. Conventionally, one of these is the target density, only accessible through samples, while the other is taken as a simple base density that is data-agnostic. In this work, using the framework of stochastic interpolants, we formalize how to \textit{couple} the base and the target densities. This enables us to incorporate information about class labels or continuous embeddings to construct dynamical transport maps that serve as conditional generative models. We show that these transport maps can be learned by solving a simple square loss regression problem analogous to the standard independent setting. We demonstrate the usefulness of constructing dependent couplings in practice through experiments in super-resolution and in-painting.  ( 2 min )

Existing object-search approaches enable robots to search through free pathways, however, robots operating in unstructured human-centered environments frequently also have to manipulate the environment to their needs. In this work, we introduce a novel interactive multi-object search task in which a robot has to open doors to navigate rooms and search inside cabinets and drawers to find target objects. These new challenges require combining manipulation and navigation skills in unexplored environments. We present HIMOS, a hierarchical reinforcement learning approach that learns to compose exploration, navigation, and manipulation skills. To achieve this, we design an abstract high-level action space around a semantic map memory and leverage the explored environment as instance navigation points. We perform extensive experiments in simulation and the real world that demonstrate that, with accurate perception, the decision making of HIMOS effectively transfers to new environments in a zero-shot manner. It shows robustness to unseen subpolicies, failures in their execution, and different robot kinematics. These capabilities open the door to a wide range of downstream tasks across embodied AI and real-world use cases.  ( 2 min )

Programs involving discontinuities introduced by control flow constructs such as conditional branches pose challenges to mathematical optimization methods that assume a degree of smoothness in the objective function's response surface. Smooth interpretation (SI) is a form of abstract interpretation that approximates the convolution of a program's output with a Gaussian kernel, thus smoothing its output in a principled manner. Here, we combine SI with automatic differentiation (AD) to efficiently compute gradients of smoothed programs. In contrast to AD across a regular program execution, these gradients also capture the effects of alternative control flow paths. The combination of SI with AD enables the direct gradient-based parameter synthesis for branching programs, allowing for instance the calibration of simulation models or their combination with neural network models in machine learning pipelines. We detail the effects of the approximations made for tractability in SI and propose a novel Monte Carlo estimator that avoids the underlying assumptions by estimating the smoothed programs' gradients through a combination of AD and sampling. Using DiscoGrad, our tool for automatically translating simple C++ programs to a smooth differentiable form, we perform an extensive evaluation. We compare the combination of SI with AD and our Monte Carlo estimator to existing gradient-free and stochastic methods on four non-trivial and originally discontinuous problems ranging from classical simulation-based optimization to neural network-driven control. While the optimization progress with the SI-based estimator depends on the complexity of the programs' control flow, our Monte Carlo estimator is competitive in all problems, exhibiting the fastest convergence by a substantial margin in our highest-dimensional problem.  ( 3 min )

As cyclones become more intense due to climate change, the rise of AI-based modelling provides a more affordable and accessible approach compared to traditional methods based on mathematical models. This work leverages diffusion models to forecast cyclone trajectories and precipitation patterns by integrating satellite imaging, remote sensing, and atmospheric data, employing a cascaded approach that incorporates forecasting, super-resolution, and precipitation modelling, with training on a dataset of 51 cyclones from six major basins. Experiments demonstrate that the final forecasts from the cascaded models show accurate predictions up to a 36-hour rollout, with SSIM and PSNR values exceeding 0.5 and 20 dB, respectively, for all three tasks. This work also highlights the promising efficiency of AI methods such as diffusion models for high-performance needs, such as cyclone forecasting, while remaining computationally affordable, making them ideal for highly vulnerable regions with critical forecasting needs and financial limitations. Code accessible at \url{https://github.com/nathzi1505/forecast-diffmodels}.  ( 2 min )

An extension of Transformers is proposed that enables explicit relational reasoning through a novel module called the Abstractor. At the core of the Abstractor is a variant of attention called relational cross-attention. The approach is motivated by an architectural inductive bias for relational learning that disentangles relational information from extraneous features about individual objects. This enables explicit relational reasoning, supporting abstraction and generalization from limited data. The Abstractor is first evaluated on simple discriminative relational tasks and compared to existing relational architectures. Next, the Abstractor is evaluated on purely relational sequence-to-sequence tasks, where dramatic improvements are seen in sample efficiency compared to standard Transformers. Finally, Abstractors are evaluated on a collection of tasks based on mathematical problem solving, where modest but consistent improvements in performance and sample efficiency are observed.  ( 2 min )

In this work, we consider the general problem of constructing a neural network surrogate model using multi-fidelity information. Given an inexpensive low-fidelity and an expensive high-fidelity computational model, we present a residual multi-fidelity computational framework that formulates the correlation between models as a residual function, a possibly non-linear mapping between 1) the shared input space of the models together with the low-fidelity model output and 2) the discrepancy between the two model outputs. To accomplish this, we train two neural networks to work in concert. The first network learns the residual function on a small set of high-fidelity and low-fidelity data. Once trained, this network is used to generate additional synthetic high-fidelity data, which is used in the training of a second network. This second network, once trained, acts as our surrogate for the high-fidelity quantity of interest. We present three numerical examples to demonstrate the power of the proposed framework. In particular, we show that dramatic savings in computational cost may be achieved when the output predictions are desired to be accurate within small tolerances.  ( 2 min )

The one of the significant challenges faced by autonomous robotic ultrasound systems is acquiring high-quality images across different patients. The proper orientation of the robotized probe plays a crucial role in governing the quality of ultrasound images. To address this challenge, we propose a sample-efficient method to automatically adjust the orientation of the ultrasound probe normal to the point of contact on the scanning surface, thereby improving the acoustic coupling of the probe and resulting image quality. Our method utilizes Bayesian Optimization (BO) based search on the scanning surface to efficiently search for the normalized probe orientation. We formulate a novel objective function for BO that leverages the contact force measurements and underlying mechanics to identify the normal. We further incorporate a regularization scheme in BO to handle the noisy objective function. The performance of the proposed strategy has been assessed through experiments on urinary bladder phantoms. These phantoms included planar, tilted, and rough surfaces, and were examined using both linear and convex probes with varying search space limits. Further, simulation-based studies have been carried out using 3D human mesh models. The results demonstrate that the mean ($\pm$SD) absolute angular error averaged over all phantoms and 3D models is $\boldsymbol{2.4\pm0.7^\circ}$ and $\boldsymbol{2.1\pm1.3^\circ}$, respectively.  ( 2 min )

A prominent theory of affective response to music revolves around the concepts of surprisal and expectation. In prior work, this idea has been operationalized in the form of probabilistic models of music which allow for precise computation of song (or note-by-note) probabilities, conditioned on a 'training set' of prior musical or cultural experiences. To date, however, these models have been limited to compute exact probabilities through hand-crafted features or restricted to linear models which are likely not sufficient to represent the complex conditional distributions present in music. In this work, we propose to use modern deep probabilistic generative models in the form of a Diffusion Model to compute an approximate likelihood of a musical input sequence. Unlike prior work, such a generative model parameterized by deep neural networks is able to learn complex non-linear features directly from a training set itself. In doing so, we expect to find that such models are able to more accurately represent the 'surprisal' of music for human listeners. From the literature, it is known that there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between surprisal and the amount human subjects 'like' a given song. In this work we show that pre-trained diffusion models indeed yield musical surprisal values which exhibit a negative quadratic relationship with measured subject 'liking' ratings, and that the quality of this relationship is competitive with state of the art methods such as IDyOM. We therefore present this model a preliminary step in developing modern deep generative models of music expectation and subjective likability.  ( 2 min )

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) focuses on training reward-maximizing agents subject to pre-defined safety constraints. Yet, learning versatile safe policies that can adapt to varying safety constraint requirements during deployment without retraining remains a largely unexplored and challenging area. In this work, we formulate the versatile safe RL problem and consider two primary requirements: training efficiency and zero-shot adaptation capability. To address them, we introduce the Conditioned Constrained Policy Optimization (CCPO) framework, consisting of two key modules: (1) Versatile Value Estimation (VVE) for approximating value functions under unseen threshold conditions, and (2) Conditioned Variational Inference (CVI) for encoding arbitrary constraint thresholds during policy optimization. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that CCPO outperforms the baselines in terms of safety and task performance while preserving zero-shot adaptation capabilities to different constraint thresholds data-efficiently. This makes our approach suitable for real-world dynamic applications.  ( 2 min )

The mathematical forces at work behind Generative Adversarial Networks raise challenging theoretical issues. Motivated by the important question of characterizing the geometrical properties of the generated distributions, we provide a thorough analysis of Wasserstein GANs (WGANs) in both the finite sample and asymptotic regimes. We study the specific case where the latent space is univariate and derive results valid regardless of the dimension of the output space. We show in particular that for a fixed sample size, the optimal WGANs are closely linked with connected paths minimizing the sum of the squared Euclidean distances between the sample points. We also highlight the fact that WGANs are able to approach (for the 1-Wasserstein distance) the target distribution as the sample size tends to infinity, at a given convergence rate and provided the family of generative Lipschitz functions grows appropriately. We derive in passing new results on optimal transport theory in the semi-discrete setting.  ( 2 min )

A key limitation preventing the wider adoption of autonomous agents trained via deep reinforcement learning (RL) is their limited ability to generalise to new environments, even when these share similar characteristics with environments encountered during training. In this work, we investigate how a non-uniform sampling strategy of individual environment instances, or levels, affects the zero-shot generalisation (ZSG) ability of RL agents, considering two failure modes: overfitting and over-generalisation. As a first step, we measure the mutual information (MI) between the agent's internal representation and the set of training levels, which we find to be well-correlated to instance overfitting. In contrast to uniform sampling, adaptive sampling strategies prioritising levels based on their value loss are more effective at maintaining lower MI, which provides a novel theoretical justification for this class of techniques. We then turn our attention to unsupervised environment design (UED) methods, which adaptively generate new training levels and minimise MI more effectively than methods sampling from a fixed set. However, we find UED methods significantly shift the training distribution, resulting in over-generalisation and worse ZSG performance over the distribution of interest. To prevent both instance overfitting and over-generalisation, we introduce self-supervised environment design (SSED). SSED generates levels using a variational autoencoder, effectively reducing MI while minimising the shift with the distribution of interest, and leads to statistically significant improvements in ZSG over fixed-set level sampling strategies and UED methods.  ( 3 min )

Preserving individual privacy while enabling collaborative data sharing is crucial for organizations. Synthetic data generation is one solution, producing artificial data that mirrors the statistical properties of private data. While numerous techniques have been devised under differential privacy, they predominantly assume data is centralized. However, data is often distributed across multiple clients in a federated manner. In this work, we initiate the study of federated synthetic tabular data generation. Building upon a SOTA central method known as AIM, we present DistAIM and FLAIM. We show it is straightforward to distribute AIM, extending a recent approach based on secure multi-party computation which necessitates additional overhead, making it less suited to federated scenarios. We then demonstrate that naively federating AIM can lead to substantial degradation in utility under the presence of heterogeneity. To mitigate both issues, we propose an augmented FLAIM approach that maintains a private proxy of heterogeneity. We simulate our methods across a range of benchmark datasets under different degrees of heterogeneity and show this can improve utility while reducing overhead.  ( 2 min )

Advancements in genomic research such as high-throughput sequencing techniques have driven modern genomic studies into "big data" disciplines. This data explosion is constantly challenging conventional methods used in genomics. In parallel with the urgent demand for robust algorithms, deep learning has succeeded in a variety of fields such as vision, speech, and text processing. Yet genomics entails unique challenges to deep learning since we are expecting from deep learning a superhuman intelligence that explores beyond our knowledge to interpret the genome. A powerful deep learning model should rely on insightful utilization of task-specific knowledge. In this paper, we briefly discuss the strengths of different deep learning models from a genomic perspective so as to fit each particular task with a proper deep architecture, and remark on practical considerations of developing modern deep learning architectures for genomics. We also provide a concise review of deep learning applications in various aspects of genomic research, as well as pointing out potential opportunities and obstacles for future genomics applications.  ( 2 min )

We design controlled experiments to study HOW generative language models, like GPT, learn context-free grammars (CFGs) -- diverse language systems with a tree-like structure capturing many aspects of natural languages, programs, and logics. CFGs are as hard as pushdown automata, and can be ambiguous so that verifying if a string satisfies the rules requires dynamic programming. We construct synthetic data and demonstrate that even for difficult (long and ambiguous) CFGs, pre-trained transformers can learn to generate sentences with near-perfect accuracy and impressive diversity. More importantly, we delve into the physical principles behind how transformers learns CFGs. We discover that the hidden states within the transformer implicitly and precisely encode the CFG structure (such as putting tree node information exactly on the subtree boundary), and learn to form "boundary to boundary" attentions resembling dynamic programming. We also cover some extension of CFGs as well as the robustness aspect of transformers against grammar mistakes. Overall, our research provides a comprehensive and empirical understanding of how transformers learn CFGs, and reveals the physical mechanisms utilized by transformers to capture the structure and rules of languages.  ( 2 min )

Recent results suggest that splitting topological navigation into robot-independent and robot-specific components improves navigation performance by enabling the robot-independent part to be trained with data collected by different robot types. However, the navigation methods are still limited by the scarcity of suitable training data and suffer from poor computational scaling. In this work, we present PlaceNav, subdividing the robot-independent part into navigation-specific and generic computer vision components. We utilize visual place recognition for the subgoal selection of the topological navigation pipeline. This makes subgoal selection more efficient and enables leveraging large-scale datasets from non-robotics sources, increasing training data availability. Bayesian filtering, enabled by place recognition, further improves navigation performance by increasing the temporal consistency of subgoals. Our experimental results verify the design and the new model obtains a 76% higher success rate in indoor and 23% higher in outdoor navigation tasks with higher computational efficiency.  ( 2 min )

In 1976, Lai constructed a nontrivial confidence sequence for the mean $\mu$ of a Gaussian distribution with unknown variance $\sigma$. Curiously, he employed both an improper (right Haar) mixture over $\sigma$ and an improper (flat) mixture over $\mu$. Here, we elaborate carefully on the details of his construction, which use generalized nonintegrable martingales and an extended Ville's inequality. While this does yield a sequential t-test, it does not yield an ``e-process'' (due to the nonintegrability of his martingale). In this paper, we develop two new e-processes and confidence sequences for the same setting: one is a test martingale in a reduced filtration, while the other is an e-process in the canonical data filtration. These are respectively obtained by swapping Lai's flat mixture for a Gaussian mixture, and swapping the right Haar mixture over $\sigma$ with the maximum likelihood estimate under the null, as done in universal inference. We also analyze the width of resulting confidence sequences, which have a curious dependence on the error probability $\alpha$. Numerical experiments are provided along the way to compare and contrast the various approaches.  ( 2 min )

Measures of power grid vulnerability are often assessed by the amount of damage an adversary can exact on the network. However, the cascading impact of such attacks is often overlooked, even though cascades are one of the primary causes of large-scale blackouts. This paper explores modifications of transmission line protection settings as candidates for adversarial attacks, which can remain undetectable as long as the network equilibrium state remains unaltered. This forms the basis of a black-box function in a Bayesian optimization procedure, where the objective is to find protection settings that maximize network degradation due to cascading. Notably, our proposed method is agnostic to the choice of the cascade simulator and its underlying assumptions. Numerical experiments reveal that, against conventional wisdom, maximally misconfiguring the protection settings of all network lines does not cause the most cascading. More surprisingly, even when the degree of misconfiguration is limited due to resource constraints, it is still possible to find settings that produce cascades comparable in severity to instances where there are no resource constraints.  ( 2 min )

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in performing a range of instruction following tasks in few and zero-shot settings. However, teaching LLMs to perform tasks on the web presents fundamental challenges -- combinatorially large open-world tasks and variations across web interfaces. We tackle these challenges by leveraging LLMs to decompose web tasks into a collection of sub-tasks, each of which can be solved by a low-level, closed-loop policy. These policies constitute a shared grammar across tasks, i.e., new web tasks can be expressed as a composition of these policies. We propose a novel framework, Hierarchical Policies for Web Actions using LLMs (HeaP), that learns a set of hierarchical LLM prompts from demonstrations for planning high-level tasks and executing them via a sequence of low-level policies. We evaluate HeaP against a range of baselines on a suite of web tasks, including MiniWoB++, WebArena, a mock airline CRM, as well as live website interactions, and show that it is able to outperform prior works using orders of magnitude less data.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we introduce a novel class of graphical models for representing time lag specific causal relationships and independencies of multivariate time series with unobserved confounders. We completely characterize these graphs and show that they constitute proper subsets of the currently employed model classes. As we show, from the novel graphs one can thus draw stronger causal inferences -- without additional assumptions. We further introduce a graphical representation of Markov equivalence classes of the novel graphs. This graphical representation contains more causal knowledge than what current state-of-the-art causal discovery algorithms learn.  ( 2 min )

Machine learning classification problems are widespread in bioinformatics, but the technical knowledge required to perform model training, optimization, and inference can prevent researchers from utilizing this technology. This article presents an automated tool for machine learning classification problems to simplify the process of training models and producing results while providing informative visualizations and insights into the data. This tool supports both binary and multiclass classification problems, and it provides access to a variety of models and methods. Synthetic data can be generated within the interface to fill missing values, balance class labels, or generate entirely new datasets. It also provides support for feature evaluation and generates explainability scores to indicate which features influence the output the most. We present CLASSify, an open-source tool for simplifying the user experience of solving classification problems without the need for knowledge of machine learning.  ( 2 min )

Electrocardiogram (ECG) is an essential signal in monitoring human heart activities. Researchers have achieved promising results in leveraging ECGs in clinical applications with deep learning models. However, the mainstream deep learning approaches usually neglect the periodic and formative attribute of the ECG heartbeat waveform. In this work, we propose a novel ECG-Segment based Learning (ECG-SL) framework to explicitly model the periodic nature of ECG signals. More specifically, ECG signals are first split into heartbeat segments, and then structural features are extracted from each of the segments. Based on the structural features, a temporal model is designed to learn the temporal information for various clinical tasks. Further, due to the fact that massive ECG signals are available but the labeled data are very limited, we also explore self-supervised learning strategy to pre-train the models, resulting significant improvement for downstream tasks. The proposed method outperforms the baseline model and shows competitive performances compared with task-specific methods in three clinical applications: cardiac condition diagnosis, sleep apnea detection, and arrhythmia classification. Further, we find that the ECG-SL tends to focus more on each heartbeat's peak and ST range than ResNet by visualizing the saliency maps.  ( 2 min )

Peptides are formed by the dehydration condensation of multiple amino acids. The primary structure of a peptide can be represented either as an amino acid sequence or as a molecular graph consisting of atoms and chemical bonds. Previous studies have indicated that deep learning routes specific to sequential and graphical peptide forms exhibit comparable performance on downstream tasks. Despite the fact that these models learn representations of the same modality of peptides, we find that they explain their predictions differently. Considering sequential and graphical models as two experts making inferences from different perspectives, we work on fusing expert knowledge to enrich the learned representations for improving the discriminative performance. To achieve this, we propose a peptide co-modeling method, RepCon, which employs a contrastive learning-based framework to enhance the mutual information of representations from decoupled sequential and graphical end-to-end models. It considers representations from the sequential encoder and the graphical encoder for the same peptide sample as a positive pair and learns to enhance the consistency of representations between positive sample pairs and to repel representations between negative pairs. Empirical studies of RepCon and other co-modeling methods are conducted on open-source discriminative datasets, including aggregation propensity, retention time, antimicrobial peptide prediction, and family classification from Peptide Database. Our results demonstrate the superiority of the co-modeling approach over independent modeling, as well as the superiority of RepCon over other methods under the co-modeling framework. In addition, the attribution on RepCon further corroborates the validity of the approach at the level of model explanation.  ( 3 min )

LiDAR sensors are used in autonomous driving applications to accurately perceive the environment. However, they are affected by adverse weather conditions such as snow, fog, and rain. These everyday phenomena introduce unwanted noise into the measurements, severely degrading the performance of LiDAR-based perception systems. In this work, we propose a framework for improving the robustness of LiDAR-based 3D object detectors against road spray. Our approach uses a state-of-the-art adverse weather detection network to filter out spray from the LiDAR point cloud, which is then used as input for the object detector. In this way, the detected objects are less affected by the adverse weather in the scene, resulting in a more accurate perception of the environment. In addition to adverse weather filtering, we explore the use of radar targets to further filter false positive detections. Tests on real-world data show that our approach improves the robustness to road spray of several popular 3D object detectors.  ( 2 min )

Owing to the prohibitive costs of generating large amounts of labeled data, programmatic weak supervision is a growing paradigm within machine learning. In this setting, users design heuristics that provide noisy labels for subsets of the data. These weak labels are combined (typically via a graphical model) to form pseudolabels, which are then used to train a downstream model. In this work, we question a foundational premise of the typical weakly supervised learning pipeline: given that the heuristic provides all ``label" information, why do we need to generate pseudolabels at all? Instead, we propose to directly transform the heuristics themselves into corresponding loss functions that penalize differences between our model and the heuristic. By constructing losses directly from the heuristics, we can incorporate more information than is used in the standard weakly supervised pipeline, such as how the heuristics make their decisions, which explicitly informs feature selection during training. We call our method Losses over Labels (LoL) as it creates losses directly from heuristics without going through the intermediate step of a label. We show that LoL improves upon existing weak supervision methods on several benchmark text and image classification tasks and further demonstrate that incorporating gradient information leads to better performance on almost every task.  ( 2 min )

Language models (LMs), despite aligning well with an average labeler through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), may not universally suit diverse human preferences. Recent approaches therefore opt for customization by collecting multi-dimensional feedback and creating distinct rewards for each dimension (e.g., helpfulness, harmlessness, honesty). LMs can then be tailored to different preferences using multi-objective RL (MORL) with different reward weightings. Yet, RL fine-tuning is unstable and resource-heavy, especially for MORLHF with diverse and usually conflicting objectives. In this paper, we present Multi-Objective Direct Preference Optimization (MODPO), an RL-free algorithm that extends Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) for multiple alignment objectives. Essentially, MODPO trains different LMs to represent different collective reward models that combine all objectives with specific weightings. With a simple cross-entropy loss, the LMs optimized against the MODPO objective are analytically the exact solutions of the original MORLHF objective. Empirical results in safety alignment and long-form question answering confirm that MODPO matches or outperforms existing methods, efficiently producing a Pareto-optimal set of LMs that cater to diverse preferences with 3 times less computational resources compared with MORLHF.  ( 2 min )

Great successes have been reported using Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to align large language models. Open-source preference datasets and reward models have enabled wider experimentation beyond generic chat settings, particularly to make systems more "helpful" for tasks like web question answering, summarization, and multi-turn dialogue. When optimizing for helpfulness, RLHF has been consistently observed to drive models to produce longer outputs. This paper demonstrates that optimizing for response length is a significant factor behind RLHF's reported improvements in these settings. First, we study the relationship between reward and length for reward models trained on three open-source preference datasets for helpfulness. Here, length correlates strongly with reward, and improvements in reward score are driven in large part by shifting the distribution over output lengths. We then explore interventions during both RL and reward model learning to see if we can achieve the same downstream improvements as RLHF without increasing length. While our interventions mitigate length increases, they aren't uniformly effective across settings. Furthermore, we find that even running RLHF with a reward based solely on length can reproduce most of the downstream improvements over the initial policy model, showing that reward models in these settings have a long way to go.  ( 2 min )

Both centralized and decentralized approaches have shown excellent performance and great application value in federated learning (FL). However, current studies do not provide sufficient evidence to show which one performs better. Although from the optimization perspective, decentralized methods can approach the comparable convergence of centralized methods with less communication, its test performance has always been inefficient in empirical studies. To comprehensively explore their behaviors in FL, we study their excess risks, including the joint analysis of both optimization and generalization. We prove that on smooth non-convex objectives, 1) centralized FL (CFL) always generalizes better than decentralized FL (DFL); 2) from perspectives of the excess risk and test error in CFL, adopting partial participation is superior to full participation; and, 3) there is a necessary requirement for the topology in DFL to avoid performance collapse as the training scale increases. Based on some simple hardware metrics, we could evaluate which framework is better in practice. Extensive experiments are conducted on common setups in FL to validate that our theoretical analysis is contextually valid in practical scenarios.  ( 2 min )

The way users acquire information is undergoing a paradigm shift with the advent of ChatGPT. Unlike conventional search engines, ChatGPT retrieves knowledge from the model itself and generates answers for users. ChatGPT's impressive question-answering (QA) capability has attracted more than 100 million users within a short period of time but has also raised concerns regarding its reliability. In this paper, we perform the first large-scale measurement of ChatGPT's reliability in the generic QA scenario with a carefully curated set of 5,695 questions across ten datasets and eight domains. We find that ChatGPT's reliability varies across different domains, especially underperforming in law and science questions. We also demonstrate that system roles, originally designed by OpenAI to allow users to steer ChatGPT's behavior, can impact ChatGPT's reliability in an imperceptible way. We further show that ChatGPT is vulnerable to adversarial examples, and even a single character change can negatively affect its reliability in certain cases. We believe that our study provides valuable insights into ChatGPT's reliability and underscores the need for strengthening the reliability and security of large language models (LLMs).  ( 2 min )

A broad current application of algorithms is in formal and quantitative measures of murky concepts -- like merit -- to make decisions. When people strategically respond to these sorts of evaluations in order to gain favorable decision outcomes, their behavior can be subjected to moral judgments. They may be described as 'gaming the system' or 'cheating,' or (in other cases) investing 'honest effort' or 'improving.' Machine learning literature on strategic behavior has tried to describe these dynamics by emphasizing the efforts expended by decision subjects hoping to obtain a more favorable assessment -- some works offer ways to preempt or prevent such manipulations, some differentiate 'gaming' from 'improvement' behavior, while others aim to measure the effort burden or disparate effects of classification systems. We begin from a different starting point: that the design of an evaluation itself can be understood as furthering goals held by the evaluator which may be misaligned with broader societal goals. To develop the idea that evaluation represents a strategic interaction in which both the evaluator and the subject of their evaluation are operating out of self-interest, we put forward a model that represents the process of evaluation using three interacting agents: a decision subject, an evaluator, and society, representing a bundle of values and oversight mechanisms. We highlight our model's applicability to a number of social systems where one or two players strategically undermine the others' interests to advance their own. Treating evaluators as themselves strategic allows us to re-cast the scrutiny directed at decision subjects, towards the incentives that underpin institutional designs of evaluations. The moral standing of strategic behaviors often depend on the moral standing of the evaluations and incentives that provoke such behaviors.

Data-driven constitutive modeling with neural networks has received increased interest in recent years due to its ability to easily incorporate physical and mechanistic constraints and to overcome the challenging and time-consuming task of formulating phenomenological constitutive laws that can accurately capture the observed material response. However, even though neural network-based constitutive laws have been shown to generalize proficiently, the generated representations are not easily interpretable due to their high number of trainable parameters. Sparse regression approaches exist that allow to obtaining interpretable expressions, but the user is tasked with creating a library of model forms which by construction limits their expressiveness to the functional forms provided in the libraries. In this work, we propose to train regularized physics-augmented neural network-based constitutive models utilizing a smoothed version of $L^{0}$-regularization. This aims to maintain the trustworthiness inherited by the physical constraints, but also enables interpretability which has not been possible thus far on any type of machine learning-based constitutive model where model forms were not assumed a-priory but were actually discovered. During the training process, the network simultaneously fits the training data and penalizes the number of active parameters, while also ensuring constitutive constraints such as thermodynamic consistency. We show that the method can reliably obtain interpretable and trustworthy constitutive models for compressible and incompressible hyperelasticity, yield functions, and hardening models for elastoplasticity, for synthetic and experimental data.

Network alignment is the task of establishing one-to-one correspondences between the nodes of different graphs and finds a plethora of applications in high-impact domains. However, this task is known to be NP-hard in its general form, and existing algorithms do not scale up as the size of the graphs increases. To tackle both challenges we propose a novel generalized graph autoencoder architecture, designed to extract powerful and robust node embeddings, that are tailored to the alignment task. We prove that the generated embeddings are associated with the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the graphs and can achieve more accurate alignment compared to classical spectral methods. Our proposed framework also leverages transfer learning and data augmentation to achieve efficient network alignment at a very large scale without retraining. Extensive experiments on both network and sub-network alignment with real-world graphs provide corroborating evidence supporting the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed approach.

Diffusion models, as a kind of powerful generative model, have given impressive results on image super-resolution (SR) tasks. However, due to the randomness introduced in the reverse process of diffusion models, the performances of diffusion-based SR models are fluctuating at every time of sampling, especially for samplers with few resampled steps. This inherent randomness of diffusion models results in ineffectiveness and instability, making it challenging for users to guarantee the quality of SR results. However, our work takes this randomness as an opportunity: fully analyzing and leveraging it leads to the construction of an effective plug-and-play sampling method that owns the potential to benefit a series of diffusion-based SR methods. More in detail, we propose to steadily sample high-quality SR images from pre-trained diffusion-based SR models by solving diffusion ordinary differential equations (diffusion ODEs) with optimal boundary conditions (BCs) and analyze the characteristics between the choices of BCs and their corresponding SR results. Our analysis shows the route to obtain an approximately optimal BC via an efficient exploration in the whole space. The quality of SR results sampled by the proposed method with fewer steps outperforms the quality of results sampled by current methods with randomness from the same pre-trained diffusion-based SR model, which means that our sampling method "boosts" current diffusion-based SR models without any additional training.

We investigate the variational optimality (specifically, the Banach space optimality) of a large class of neural architectures with multivariate nonlinearities/activation functions. To that end, we construct a new family of Banach spaces defined via a regularization operator and the $k$-plane transform. We prove a representer theorem that states that the solution sets to learning problems posed over these Banach spaces are completely characterized by neural architectures with multivariate nonlinearities. These optimal architectures have skip connections and are tightly connected to orthogonal weight normalization and multi-index models, both of which have received considerable interest in the neural network community. Our framework is compatible with a number of classical nonlinearities including the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function, the norm activation function, and the radial basis functions found in the theory of thin-plate/polyharmonic splines. We also show that the underlying spaces are special instances of reproducing kernel Banach spaces and variation spaces. Our results shed light on the regularity of functions learned by neural networks trained on data, particularly with multivariate nonlinearities, and provide new theoretical motivation for several architectural choices found in practice.

Due to the large-scale availability of data, machine learning (ML) algorithms are being deployed in distributed topologies, where different nodes collaborate to train ML models over their individual data by exchanging model-related information (e.g., gradients) with a central server. However, distributed learning schemes are notably vulnerable to two threats. First, Byzantine nodes can single-handedly corrupt the learning by sending incorrect information to the server, e.g., erroneous gradients. The standard approach to mitigate such behavior is to use a non-linear robust aggregation method at the server. Second, the server can violate the privacy of the nodes. Recent attacks have shown that exchanging (unencrypted) gradients enables a curious server to recover the totality of the nodes' data. The use of homomorphic encryption (HE), a gold standard security primitive, has extensively been studied as a privacy-preserving solution to distributed learning in non-Byzantine scenarios. However, due to HE's large computational demand especially for high-dimensional ML models, there has not yet been any attempt to design purely homomorphic operators for non-linear robust aggregators. In this work, we present SABLE, the first completely homomorphic and Byzantine robust distributed learning algorithm. SABLE essentially relies on a novel plaintext encoding method that enables us to implement the robust aggregator over batching-friendly BGV. Moreover, this encoding scheme also accelerates state-of-the-art homomorphic sorting with larger security margins and smaller ciphertext size. We perform extensive experiments on image classification tasks and show that our algorithm achieves practical execution times while matching the ML performance of its non-private counterpart.

Accurate precipitation forecasting is a vital challenge of both scientific and societal importance. Data-driven approaches have emerged as a widely used solution for addressing this challenge. However, solely relying on data-driven approaches has limitations in modeling the underlying physics, making accurate predictions difficult. Coupling AI-based post-processing techniques with traditional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) methods offers a more effective solution for improving forecasting accuracy. Despite previous post-processing efforts, accurately predicting heavy rainfall remains challenging due to the imbalanced precipitation data across locations and complex relationships between multiple meteorological variables. To address these limitations, we introduce the PostRainBench, a comprehensive multi-variable NWP post-processing benchmark consisting of three datasets for NWP post-processing-based precipitation forecasting. We propose CAMT, a simple yet effective Channel Attention Enhanced Multi-task Learning framework with a specially designed weighted loss function. Its flexible design allows for easy plug-and-play integration with various backbones. Extensive experimental results on the proposed benchmark show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 6.3%, 4.7%, and 26.8% in rain CSI on the three datasets respectively. Most notably, our model is the first deep learning-based method to outperform traditional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) approaches in extreme precipitation conditions. It shows improvements of 15.6%, 17.4%, and 31.8% over NWP predictions in heavy rain CSI on respective datasets. These results highlight the potential impact of our model in reducing the severe consequences of extreme weather events.

Since ChatGPT has emerged as a major AIGC model, providing high-quality responses across a wide range of applications (including software development and maintenance), it has attracted much interest from many individuals. ChatGPT has great promise, but there are serious problems that might arise from its misuse, especially in the realms of education and public safety. Several AIGC detectors are available, and they have all been tested on genuine text. However, more study is needed to see how effective they are for multi-domain ChatGPT material. This study aims to fill this need by creating a multi-domain dataset for testing the state-of-the-art APIs and tools for detecting artificially generated information used by universities and other research institutions. A large dataset consisting of articles, abstracts, stories, news, and product reviews was created for this study. The second step is to use the newly created dataset to put six tools through their paces. Six different artificial intelligence (AI) text identification systems, including "GPTkit," "GPTZero," "Originality," "Sapling," "Writer," and "Zylalab," have accuracy rates between 55.29 and 97.0%. Although all the tools fared well in the evaluations, originality was particularly effective across the board.

Human motion prediction is an essential step for efficient and safe human-robot collaboration. Current methods either purely rely on representing the human joints in some form of neural network-based architecture or use regression models offline to fit hyper-parameters in the hope of capturing a model encompassing human motion. While these methods provide good initial results, they are missing out on leveraging well-studied human body kinematic models as well as body and scene constraints which can help boost the efficacy of these prediction frameworks while also explicitly avoiding implausible human joint configurations. We propose a novel human motion prediction framework that incorporates human joint constraints and scene constraints in a Gaussian Process Regression (GPR) model to predict human motion over a set time horizon. This formulation is combined with an online context-aware constraints model to leverage task-dependent motions. It is tested on a human arm kinematic model and implemented on a human-robot collaborative setup with a UR5 robot arm to demonstrate the real-time capability of our approach. Simulations were also performed on datasets like HA4M and ANDY. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate considerable improvements in a Gaussian Process framework when these constraints are explicitly considered.

Pulmonary diseases rank prominently among the principal causes of death worldwide. Curing them will require, among other things, a better understanding of the many complex 3D tree-shaped structures within the pulmonary system, such as airways, arteries, and veins. In theory, they can be modeled using high-resolution image stacks. Unfortunately, standard CNN approaches operating on dense voxel grids are prohibitively expensive. To remedy this, we introduce a point-based approach that preserves graph connectivity of tree skeleton and incorporates an implicit surface representation. It delivers SOTA accuracy at a low computational cost and the resulting models have usable surfaces. Due to the scarcity of publicly accessible data, we have also curated an extensive dataset to evaluate our approach and will make it public.

Self-play (SP) is a popular multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) framework for solving competitive games, where each agent optimizes policy by treating others as part of the environment. Despite the empirical successes, the theoretical properties of SP-based methods are limited to two-player zero-sum games. However, for mixed cooperative-competitive games where agents on the same team need to cooperate with each other, we can show a simple counter-example where SP-based methods cannot converge to a global Nash equilibrium (NE) with high probability. Alternatively, Policy-Space Response Oracles (PSRO) is an iterative framework for learning NE, where the best responses w.r.t. previous policies are learned in each iteration. PSRO can be directly extended to mixed cooperative-competitive settings by jointly learning team best responses with all convergence properties unchanged. However, PSRO requires repeatedly training joint policies from scratch till convergence, which makes it hard to scale to complex games. In this work, we develop a novel algorithm, Fictitious Cross-Play (FXP), which inherits the benefits from both frameworks. FXP simultaneously trains an SP-based main policy and a counter population of best response policies. The main policy is trained by fictitious self-play and cross-play against the counter population, while the counter policies are trained as the best responses to the main policy's past versions. We validate our method in matrix games and show that FXP converges to global NEs while SP methods fail. We also conduct experiments in a gridworld domain, where FXP achieves higher Elo ratings and lower exploitabilities than baselines, and a more challenging football game, where FXP defeats SOTA models with over 94% win rate.

The study of interacting dynamical systems continues to attract research interest in various fields of science and engineering. In a collection of interacting particles, the interaction network contains information about how various components interact with one another. Inferring the information about the interaction network from the dynamics of agents is a problem of long-standing interest. In this work, we employ a self-supervised neural network model to achieve two outcomes: to recover the interaction network and to predict the dynamics of individual agents. Both these information are inferred solely from the observed trajectory data. This work presents an application of the Neural Relational Inference model to two dynamical systems: coupled particles mediated by Hooke's law interaction and coupled phase (Kuramoto) oscillators.

Multi-objective learning (MOL) problems often arise in emerging machine learning problems when there are multiple learning criteria, data modalities, or learning tasks. Different from single-objective learning, one of the critical challenges in MOL is the potential conflict among different objectives during the iterative optimization process. Recent works have developed various dynamic weighting algorithms for MOL such as MGDA and its variants, where the central idea is to find an update direction that avoids conflicts among objectives. Albeit its appealing intuition, empirical studies show that dynamic weighting methods may not always outperform static ones. To understand this theory-practical gap, we focus on a new stochastic variant of MGDA - the Multi-objective gradient with Double sampling (MoDo) algorithm, and study the generalization performance of the dynamic weighting-based MoDo and its interplay with optimization through the lens of algorithm stability. Perhaps surprisingly, we find that the key rationale behind MGDA -- updating along conflict-avoidant direction - may hinder dynamic weighting algorithms from achieving the optimal ${\cal O}(1/\sqrt{n})$ population risk, where $n$ is the number of training samples. We further demonstrate the impact of the variability of dynamic weights on the three-way trade-off among optimization, generalization, and conflict avoidance that is unique in MOL. We showcase the generality of our theoretical framework by analyzing other existing stochastic MOL algorithms under the framework. Experiments on various multi-task learning benchmarks are performed to demonstrate the practical applicability. Code is available at https://github.com/heshandevaka/Trade-Off-MOL.

Building machines that can reason about physical events and their causal relationships is crucial for flexible interaction with the physical world. However, most existing physical and causal reasoning benchmarks are exclusively based on synthetically generated events and synthetic natural language descriptions of causal relationships. This design brings up two issues. First, there is a lack of diversity in both event types and natural language descriptions; second, causal relationships based on manually-defined heuristics are different from human judgments. To address both shortcomings, we present the CLEVRER-Humans benchmark, a video reasoning dataset for causal judgment of physical events with human labels. We employ two techniques to improve data collection efficiency: first, a novel iterative event cloze task to elicit a new representation of events in videos, which we term Causal Event Graphs (CEGs); second, a data augmentation technique based on neural language generative models. We convert the collected CEGs into questions and answers to be consistent with prior work. Finally, we study a collection of baseline approaches for CLEVRER-Humans question-answering, highlighting the great challenges set forth by our benchmark.

Generative Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable results for a wide range of tasks. However, deploying these models for inference has been a significant challenge due to their unprecedented resource requirements. This has forced existing deployment frameworks to use multi-GPU inference pipelines, which are often complex and costly, or to use smaller and less performant models. In this work, we demonstrate that the main bottleneck for generative inference with LLMs is memory bandwidth, rather than compute, specifically for single batch inference. While quantization has emerged as a promising solution by representing model weights with reduced precision, previous efforts have often resulted in notable performance degradation. To address this, we introduce SqueezeLLM, a post-training quantization framework that not only enables lossless compression to ultra-low precisions of up to 3-bit, but also achieves higher quantization performance under the same memory constraint. Our framework incorporates two novel ideas: (i) sensitivity-based non-uniform quantization, which searches for the optimal bit precision assignment based on second-order information; and (ii) the Dense-and-Sparse decomposition that stores outliers and sensitive weight values in an efficient sparse format. When applied to the LLaMA models, our 3-bit quantization significantly reduces the perplexity gap from the FP16 baseline by up to 2.1x as compared to the state-of-the-art methods with the same memory requirement. Furthermore, when deployed on an A6000 GPU, our quantized models achieve up to 2.3x speedup compared to the baseline. Our code is open-sourced and available online.

Audio adversarial examples are audio files that have been manipulated to fool an automatic speech recognition (ASR) system, while still sounding benign to a human listener. Most methods to generate such samples are based on a two-step algorithm: first, a viable adversarial audio file is produced, then, this is fine-tuned with respect to perceptibility and robustness. In this work, we present an integrated algorithm that uses psychoacoustic models and room impulse responses (RIR) in the generation step. The RIRs are dynamically created by a neural network during the generation process to simulate a physical environment to harden our examples against transformations experienced in over-the-air attacks. We compare the different approaches in three experiments: in a simulated environment and in a realistic over-the-air scenario to evaluate the robustness, and in a human study to evaluate the perceptibility. Our algorithms considering psychoacoustics only or in addition to the robustness show an improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) as well as in the human perception study, at the cost of an increased word error rate (WER).

Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promising results for real-time control systems, including the domain of plasma magnetic control. However, there are still significant drawbacks compared to traditional feedback control approaches for magnetic confinement. In this work, we address key drawbacks of the RL method; achieving higher control accuracy for desired plasma properties, reducing the steady-state error, and decreasing the required time to learn new tasks. We build on top of \cite{degrave2022magnetic}, and present algorithmic improvements to the agent architecture and training procedure. We present simulation results that show up to 65\% improvement in shape accuracy, achieve substantial reduction in the long-term bias of the plasma current, and additionally reduce the training time required to learn new tasks by a factor of 3 or more. We present new experiments using the upgraded RL-based controllers on the TCV tokamak, which validate the simulation results achieved, and point the way towards routinely achieving accurate discharges using the RL approach.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a devastating neurodegenerative condition that precedes progressive and irreversible dementia; thus, predicting its progression over time is vital for clinical diagnosis and treatment. Numerous studies have implemented structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to model AD progression, focusing on three integral aspects: (i) temporal variability, (ii) incomplete observations, and (iii) temporal geometric characteristics. However, deep learning-based approaches regarding data variability and sparsity have yet to consider inherent geometrical properties sufficiently. The ordinary differential equation-based geometric modeling method (ODE-RGRU) has recently emerged as a promising strategy for modeling time-series data by intertwining a recurrent neural network and an ODE in Riemannian space. Despite its achievements, ODE-RGRU encounters limitations when extrapolating positive definite symmetric metrics from incomplete samples, leading to feature reverse occurrences that are particularly problematic, especially within the clinical facet. Therefore, this study proposes a novel geometric learning approach that models longitudinal MRI biomarkers and cognitive scores by combining three modules: topological space shift, ODE-RGRU, and trajectory estimation. We have also developed a training algorithm that integrates manifold mapping with monotonicity constraints to reflect measurement transition irreversibility. We verify our proposed method's efficacy by predicting clinical labels and cognitive scores over time in regular and irregular settings. Furthermore, we thoroughly analyze our proposed framework through an ablation study.

Lung cancer is highly lethal, emphasizing the critical need for early detection. However, identifying lung nodules poses significant challenges for radiologists, who rely heavily on their expertise and experience for accurate diagnosis. To address this issue, computer-aided diagnosis systems based on machine learning techniques have emerged to assist doctors in identifying lung nodules from computed tomography (CT) scans. Unfortunately, existing networks in this domain often suffer from computational complexity, leading to high rates of false negatives and false positives, limiting their effectiveness. To address these challenges, we present an innovative model that harnesses the strengths of both convolutional neural networks and vision transformers. Inspired by object detection in videos, we treat each 3D CT image as a video, individual slices as frames, and lung nodules as objects, enabling a time-series application. The primary objective of our work is to overcome hardware limitations during model training, allowing for efficient processing of 2D data while utilizing inter-slice information for accurate identification based on 3D image context. We validated the proposed network by applying a 10-fold cross-validation technique to the publicly available Lung Nodule Analysis 2016 dataset. Our proposed architecture achieves an average sensitivity criterion of 97.84% and a competition performance metrics (CPM) of 96.0% with few parameters. Comparative analysis with state-of-the-art advancements in lung nodule identification demonstrates the significant accuracy achieved by our proposed model.

Future surveys such as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory will observe an order of magnitude more astrophysical transient events than any previous survey before. With this deluge of photometric data, it will be impossible for all such events to be classified by humans alone. Recent efforts have sought to leverage machine learning methods to tackle the challenge of astronomical transient classification, with ever improving success. Transformers are a recently developed deep learning architecture, first proposed for natural language processing, that have shown a great deal of recent success. In this work we develop a new transformer architecture, which uses multi-head self attention at its core, for general multi-variate time-series data. Furthermore, the proposed time-series transformer architecture supports the inclusion of an arbitrary number of additional features, while also offering interpretability. We apply the time-series transformer to the task of photometric classification, minimising the reliance of expert domain knowledge for feature selection, while achieving results comparable to state-of-the-art photometric classification methods. We achieve a logarithmic-loss of 0.507 on imbalanced data in a representative setting using data from the Photometric LSST Astronomical Time-Series Classification Challenge (PLAsTiCC). Moreover, we achieve a micro-averaged receiver operating characteristic area under curve of 0.98 and micro-averaged precision-recall area under curve of 0.87.

Hyperbolic graph convolutional networks (HGCN) have demonstrated significant potential in extracting information from hierarchical graphs. However, existing HGCNs are limited to shallow architectures, due to the expensive hyperbolic operations and the over-smoothing issue as depth increases. Although in GCNs, treatments have been applied to alleviate over-smoothing, developing a hyperbolic therapy presents distinct challenges since operations should be carefully designed to fit the hyperbolic nature. Addressing the above challenges, in this work, we propose DeepHGCN, the first deep multi-layer HGCN architecture with dramatically improved computational efficiency and substantially alleviated over-smoothing effect. DeepHGCN presents two key enablers of deep HGCNs: (1) a novel hyperbolic feature transformation layer that enables fast and accurate linear maps; and (2) Techniques such as hyperbolic residual connections and regularization for both weights and features facilitated by an efficient hyperbolic midpoint method. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DeepHGCN obtains significant improvements in link prediction and node classification tasks compared to both Euclidean and shallow hyperbolic GCN variants.

Existing approaches to algorithmic fairness aim to ensure equitable outcomes if human decision-makers comply perfectly with algorithmic decisions. However, perfect compliance with the algorithm is rarely a reality or even a desirable outcome in human-AI collaboration. Yet, recent studies have shown that selective compliance with fair algorithms can amplify discrimination relative to the prior human policy. As a consequence, ensuring equitable outcomes requires fundamentally different algorithmic design principles that ensure robustness to the decision-maker's (a priori unknown) compliance pattern. We define the notion of compliance-robustly fair algorithmic recommendations that are guaranteed to (weakly) improve fairness in decisions, regardless of the human's compliance pattern. We propose a simple optimization strategy to identify the best performance-improving compliance-robustly fair policy. However, we show that it may be infeasible to design algorithmic recommendations that are simultaneously fair in isolation, compliance-robustly fair, and more accurate than the human policy; thus, if our goal is to improve the equity and accuracy of human-AI collaboration, it may not be desirable to enforce traditional fairness constraints.  ( 2 min )

Deep neural network (DNN) models have become increasingly crucial components in intelligent software systems. However, training a DNN model is typically expensive in terms of both time and money. To address this issue, researchers have recently focused on reusing existing DNN models - borrowing the idea of code reuse in software engineering. However, reusing an entire model could cause extra overhead or inherits the weakness from the undesired functionalities. Hence, existing work proposes to decompose an already trained model into modules, i.e., modularizing-after-training, and enable module reuse. Since trained models are not built for modularization, modularizing-after-training incurs huge overhead and model accuracy loss. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that incorporates modularization into the model training process, i.e., modularizing-while-training (MwT). We train a model to be structurally modular through two loss functions that optimize intra-module cohesion and inter-module coupling. We have implemented the proposed approach for modularizing Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models in this work. The evaluation results on representative models demonstrate that MwT outperforms the state-of-the-art approach. Specifically, the accuracy loss caused by MwT is only 1.13 percentage points, which is 1.76 percentage points less than that of the baseline. The kernel retention rate of the modules generated by MwT is only 14.58%, with a reduction of 74.31% over the state-of-the-art approach. Furthermore, the total time cost required for training and modularizing is only 108 minutes, half of the baseline.

In breast surgical planning, accurate registration of MR images across patient positions has the potential to improve the localisation of tumours during breast cancer treatment. While learning-based registration methods have recently become the state-of-the-art approach for most medical image registration tasks, these methods have yet to make inroads into breast image registration due to certain difficulties-the lack of rich texture information in breast MR images and the need for the deformations to be diffeomophic. In this work, we propose learning strategies for breast MR image registration that are amenable to diffeomorphic constraints, together with early experimental results from in-silico and in-vivo experiments. One key contribution of this work is a registration network which produces superior registration outcomes for breast images in addition to providing diffeomorphic guarantees.

Gait analysis leverages unique walking patterns for person identification and assessment across multiple domains. Among the methods used for gait analysis, skeleton-based approaches have shown promise due to their robust and interpretable features. However, these methods often rely on hand-crafted spatial-temporal graphs that are based on human anatomy disregarding the particularities of the dataset and task. This paper proposes a novel method to simplify the spatial-temporal graph representation for gait-based gender estimation, improving interpretability without losing performance. Our approach employs two models, an upstream and a downstream model, that can adjust the adjacency matrix for each walking instance, thereby removing the fixed nature of the graph. By employing the Straight-Through Gumbel-Softmax trick, our model is trainable end-to-end. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on the CASIA-B dataset for gait-based gender estimation. The resulting graphs are interpretable and differ qualitatively from fixed graphs used in existing models. Our research contributes to enhancing the explainability and task-specific adaptability of gait recognition, promoting more efficient and reliable gait-based biometrics.

Federated learning (FL) offers privacy-preserving decentralized machine learning, optimizing models at edge clients without sharing private data. Simultaneously, foundation models (FMs) have gained traction in the artificial intelligence (AI) community due to their exceptional performance across various tasks. However, integrating FMs into FL presents challenges, primarily due to their substantial size and intensive resource requirements. This is especially true when considering the resource heterogeneity in edge FL systems. We present an adaptive framework for Resource-aware Federated Foundation Models (RaFFM) to address these challenges. RaFFM introduces specialized model compression algorithms tailored for FL scenarios, such as salient parameter prioritization and high-performance subnetwork extraction. These algorithms enable dynamic scaling of given transformer-based FMs to fit heterogeneous resource constraints at the network edge during both FL's optimization and deployment stages. Experimental results demonstrate that RaFFM shows significant superiority in resource utilization efficiency and uses fewer resources to deploy FMs to FL. Despite the lower resource consumption, target models optimized by RaFFM achieve performance on par with traditional FL methods applied to full-sized FMs. This is evident across tasks in both natural language processing and computer vision domains.

When artificial neural networks have demonstrated exceptional practical success in a variety of domains, investigations into their theoretical characteristics, such as their approximation power, statistical properties, and generalization performance, have concurrently made significant strides. In this paper, we construct a novel theory for understanding the effectiveness of neural networks, which offers a perspective distinct from prior research. Specifically, we explore the rationale underlying a common practice during the construction of neural network models: sample splitting. Our findings indicate that the optimal hyperparameters derived from sample splitting can enable a neural network model that asymptotically minimizes the prediction risk. We conduct extensive experiments across different application scenarios and network architectures, and the results manifest our theory's effectiveness.

Automated game design (AGD), the study of automatically generating game rules, has a long history in technical games research. AGD approaches generally rely on approximations of human play, either objective functions or AI agents. Despite this, the majority of these approximators are static, meaning they do not reflect human player's ability to learn and improve in a game. In this paper, we investigate the application of Reinforcement Learning (RL) as an approximator for human play for rule generation. We recreate the classic AGD environment Mechanic Maker in Unity as a new, open-source rule generation framework. Our results demonstrate that RL produces distinct sets of rules from an A* agent baseline, which may be more usable by humans.

By reducing the curvature of the loss surface in the parameter space, Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) yields widespread robustness improvement under domain transfer. Instead of focusing on parameters, however, this work considers the transferability of representations as the optimization target for out-of-domain generalization in a fine-tuning setup. To encourage the retention of transferable representations, we consider trust region-based fine-tuning methods, which exploit task-specific skills without forgetting task-agnostic representations from pre-training. We unify parameter- and representation-space smoothing approaches by using trust region bounds to inform SAM-style regularizers on both of these optimization surfaces. We propose Trust Region Aware Minimization (TRAM), a fine-tuning algorithm that optimizes for flat minima and smooth, informative representations without forgetting pre-trained structure. We find that TRAM outperforms both sharpness-aware and trust region-based optimization methods on cross-domain language modeling and cross-lingual transfer, where robustness to domain transfer and representation generality are critical for success. TRAM establishes a new standard in training generalizable models with minimal additional computation.

Scientific discovery and engineering design are currently limited by the time and cost of physical experiments, selected mostly through trial-and-error and intuition that require deep domain expertise. Numerical simulations present an alternative to physical experiments but are usually infeasible for complex real-world domains due to the computational requirements of existing numerical methods. Artificial intelligence (AI) presents a potential paradigm shift by developing fast data-driven surrogate models. In particular, an AI framework, known as neural operators, presents a principled framework for learning mappings between functions defined on continuous domains, e.g., spatiotemporal processes and partial differential equations (PDE). They can extrapolate and predict solutions at new locations unseen during training, i.e., perform zero-shot super-resolution. Neural operators can augment or even replace existing simulators in many applications, such as computational fluid dynamics, weather forecasting, and material modeling, while being 4-5 orders of magnitude faster. Further, neural operators can be integrated with physics and other domain constraints enforced at finer resolutions to obtain high-fidelity solutions and good generalization. Since neural operators are differentiable, they can directly optimize parameters for inverse design and other inverse problems. We believe that neural operators present a transformative approach to simulation and design, enabling rapid research and development.

Multi-object representation learning aims to represent complex real-world visual input using the composition of multiple objects. Representation learning methods have often used unsupervised learning to segment an input image into individual objects and encode these objects into each latent vector. However, it is not clear how previous methods have achieved the appropriate segmentation of individual objects. Additionally, most of the previous methods regularize the latent vectors using a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Therefore, it is not clear whether VAE regularization contributes to appropriate object segmentation. To elucidate the mechanism of object segmentation in multi-object representation learning, we conducted an ablation study on MONet, which is a typical method. MONet represents multiple objects using pairs that consist of an attention mask and the latent vector corresponding to the attention mask. Each latent vector is encoded from the input image and attention mask. Then, the component image and attention mask are decoded from each latent vector. The loss function of MONet consists of 1) the sum of reconstruction losses between the input image and decoded component image, 2) the VAE regularization loss of the latent vector, and 3) the reconstruction loss of the attention mask to explicitly encode shape information. We conducted an ablation study on these three loss functions to investigate the effect on segmentation performance. Our results showed that the VAE regularization loss did not affect segmentation performance and the others losses did affect it. Based on this result, we hypothesize that it is important to maximize the attention mask of the image region best represented by a single latent vector corresponding to the attention mask. We confirmed this hypothesis by evaluating a new loss function with the same mechanism as the hypothesis.

One of the goals in Federated Learning (FL) is to create personalized models that can adapt to the context of each participating client, while utilizing knowledge from a shared global model. Yet, often, personalization requires a fine-tuning step using clients' labeled data in order to achieve good performance. This may not be feasible in scenarios where incoming clients are fresh and/or have privacy concerns. It, then, remains open how one can achieve just-in-time personalization in these scenarios. We propose FedJETs, a novel solution by using a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) framework within a FL setup. Our method leverages the diversity of the clients to train specialized experts on different subsets of classes, and a gating function to route the input to the most relevant expert(s). Our gating function harnesses the knowledge of a pretrained model common expert to enhance its routing decisions on-the-fly. As a highlight, our approach can improve accuracy up to 18\% in state of the art FL settings, while maintaining competitive zero-shot performance. In practice, our method can handle non-homogeneous data distributions, scale more efficiently, and improve the state-of-the-art performance on common FL benchmarks.

Foundation models (FMs) are able to leverage large volumes of unlabeled data to demonstrate superior performance across a wide range of tasks. However, FMs developed for biomedical domains have largely remained unimodal, i.e., independently trained and used for tasks on protein sequences alone, small molecule structures alone, or clinical data alone. To overcome this limitation of biomedical FMs, we present BioBridge, a novel parameter-efficient learning framework, to bridge independently trained unimodal FMs to establish multimodal behavior. BioBridge achieves it by utilizing Knowledge Graphs (KG) to learn transformations between one unimodal FM and another without fine-tuning any underlying unimodal FMs. Our empirical results demonstrate that BioBridge can beat the best baseline KG embedding methods (on average by around 76.3%) in cross-modal retrieval tasks. We also identify BioBridge demonstrates out-of-domain generalization ability by extrapolating to unseen modalities or relations. Additionally, we also show that BioBridge presents itself as a general purpose retriever that can aid biomedical multimodal question answering as well as enhance the guided generation of novel drugs.

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have recently emerged as a powerful tool for 3D scene representation and rendering. These data-driven models can learn to synthesize high-quality images from sparse 2D observations, enabling realistic and interactive scene reconstructions. However, the growing usage of NeRFs in critical applications such as augmented reality, robotics, and virtual environments could be threatened by adversarial attacks. In this paper we present how generalizable NeRFs can be attacked by both low-intensity adversarial attacks and adversarial patches, where the later could be robust enough to be used in real world applications. We also demonstrate targeted attacks, where a specific, predefined output scene is generated by these attack with success.

Deep learning methods have been successfully used in various computer vision tasks. Inspired by that success, deep learning has been explored in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) reconstruction. In particular, integrating deep learning and model-based optimization methods has shown considerable advantages. However, a large amount of labeled training data is typically needed for high reconstruction quality, which is challenging for some MRI applications. In this paper, we propose a novel reconstruction method, named DURED-Net, that enables interpretable self-supervised learning for MR image reconstruction by combining a self-supervised denoising network and a plug-and-play method. We aim to boost the reconstruction performance of Noise2Noise in MR reconstruction by adding an explicit prior that utilizes imaging physics. Specifically, the leverage of a denoising network for MRI reconstruction is achieved using Regularization by Denoising (RED). Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method requires a reduced amount of training data to achieve high reconstruction quality among the state-of-art of MR reconstruction utilizing the Noise2Noise method.

Deep learning models based on resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) have been widely used to diagnose brain diseases, particularly autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Existing studies have leveraged the functional connectivity (FC) of rs-fMRI, achieving notable classification performance. However, they have significant limitations, including the lack of adequate information while using linear low-order FC as inputs to the model, not considering individual characteristics (i.e., different symptoms or varying stages of severity) among patients with ASD, and the non-explainability of the decision process. To cover these limitations, we propose a novel explainability-guided region of interest (ROI) selection (EAG-RS) framework that identifies non-linear high-order functional associations among brain regions by leveraging an explainable artificial intelligence technique and selects class-discriminative regions for brain disease identification. The proposed framework includes three steps: (i) inter-regional relation learning to estimate non-linear relations through random seed-based network masking, (ii) explainable connection-wise relevance score estimation to explore high-order relations between functional connections, and (iii) non-linear high-order FC-based diagnosis-informative ROI selection and classifier learning to identify ASD. We validated the effectiveness of our proposed method by conducting experiments using the Autism Brain Imaging Database Exchange (ABIDE) dataset, demonstrating that the proposed method outperforms other comparative methods in terms of various evaluation metrics. Furthermore, we qualitatively analyzed the selected ROIs and identified ASD subtypes linked to previous neuroscientific studies.

In previous literature, backward error analysis was used to find ordinary differential equations (ODEs) approximating the gradient descent trajectory. It was found that finite step sizes implicitly regularize solutions because terms appearing in the ODEs penalize the two-norm of the loss gradients. We prove that the existence of similar implicit regularization in RMSProp and Adam depends on their hyperparameters and the training stage, but with a different "norm" involved: the corresponding ODE terms either penalize the (perturbed) one-norm of the loss gradients or, on the contrary, hinder its decrease (the latter case being typical). We also conduct numerical experiments and discuss how the proven facts can influence generalization.

Booming deep learning has substantially improved the diagnosis for diverse lesions in ultrasound images, but a conspicuous research gap concerning cervical lymph node lesions still remains. The objective of this work is to diagnose cervical lymph node lesions in ultrasound images by leveraging a deep learning model. To this end, we first collected 3392 cervical ultrasound images containing normal lymph nodes, benign lymph node lesions, malignant primary lymph node lesions, and malignant metastatic lymph node lesions. Given that ultrasound images are generated by the reflection and scattering of sound waves across varied bodily tissues, we proposed the Conv-FFT Block. It integrates convolutional operations with the fast Fourier transform to more astutely model the images. Building upon this foundation, we designed a novel architecture, named SFUSNet. SFUSNet not only discerns variances in ultrasound images from the spatial domain but also adeptly captures micro-structural alterations across various lesions in the frequency domain. To ascertain the potential of SFUSNet, we benchmarked it against 12 popular architectures through five-fold cross-validation. The results show that SFUSNet is the state-of-the-art model and can achieve 92.89% accuracy. Moreover, its average precision, average sensitivity and average specificity for four types of lesions achieve 90.46%, 89.95% and 97.49%, respectively.

We introduce a method to improve the zero-shot reasoning abilities of large language models on general language understanding tasks. Specifically, we build an autonomous agent to instruct the reasoning process of large language models. We show this approach further unleashes the zero-shot reasoning abilities of large language models to more tasks. We study the performance of our method on a wide set of datasets spanning generation, classification, and reasoning. We show that our method generalizes to most tasks and obtains state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on 20 of the 29 datasets that we evaluate. For instance, our method boosts the performance of state-of-the-art large language models by a large margin, including Vicuna-13b (13.3%), Llama-2-70b-chat (23.2%), and GPT-3.5 Turbo (17.0%). Compared to zero-shot chain of thought, our improvement in reasoning is striking, with an average increase of 10.5%. With our method, Llama-2-70b-chat outperforms zero-shot GPT-3.5 Turbo by 10.2%.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in various evaluation benchmarks. However, concerns about their performance are raised on potential data contamination in their considerable volume of training corpus. Moreover, the static nature and fixed complexity of current benchmarks may inadequately gauge the advancing capabilities of LLMs. In this paper, we introduce DyVal, a novel, general, and flexible evaluation protocol for dynamic evaluation of LLMs. Based on our proposed dynamic evaluation framework, we build graph-informed DyVal by leveraging the structural advantage of directed acyclic graphs to dynamically generate evaluation samples with controllable complexities. DyVal generates challenging evaluation sets on reasoning tasks including mathematics, logical reasoning, and algorithm problems. We evaluate various LLMs ranging from Flan-T5-large to ChatGPT and GPT4. Experiments demonstrate that LLMs perform worse in DyVal-generated evaluation samples with different complexities, emphasizing the significance of dynamic evaluation. We also analyze the failure cases and results of different prompting methods. Moreover, DyVal-generated samples are not only evaluation sets, but also helpful data for fine-tuning to improve the performance of LLMs on existing benchmarks. We hope that DyVal can shed light on the future evaluation research of LLMs.

We study the distribution of a fully connected neural network with random Gaussian weights and biases in which the hidden layer widths are proportional to a large constant $n$. Under mild assumptions on the non-linearity, we obtain quantitative bounds on normal approximations valid at large but finite $n$ and any fixed network depth. Our theorems show both for the finite-dimensional distributions and the entire process, that the distance between a random fully connected network (and its derivatives) to the corresponding infinite width Gaussian process scales like $n^{-\gamma}$ for $\gamma>0$, with the exponent depending on the metric used to measure discrepancy. Our bounds are strictly stronger in terms of their dependence on network width than any previously available in the literature; in the one-dimensional case, we also prove that they are optimal, i.e., we establish matching lower bounds.

Music datasets play a crucial role in advancing research in machine learning for music. However, existing music datasets suffer from limited size, accessibility, and lack of audio resources. To address these shortcomings, we present DISCO-10M, a novel and extensive music dataset that surpasses the largest previously available music dataset by an order of magnitude. To ensure high-quality data, we implement a multi-stage filtering process. This process incorporates similarities based on textual descriptions and audio embeddings. Moreover, we provide precomputed CLAP embeddings alongside DISCO-10M, facilitating direct application on various downstream tasks. These embeddings enable efficient exploration of machine learning applications on the provided data. With DISCO-10M, we aim to democratize and facilitate new research to help advance the development of novel machine learning models for music.

The recent progress in large language models (LLMs), especially the invention of chain-of-thought prompting, has made it possible to automatically answer questions by stepwise reasoning. However, when faced with more complicated problems that require non-linear thinking, even the strongest LLMs make mistakes. To address this, we explore whether LLMs are able to recognize errors in their own step-by-step reasoning, without resorting to external resources. To this end, we propose SelfCheck, a general-purpose zero-shot verification schema for recognizing such errors. We then use the results of these checks to improve question-answering performance by conducting weighted voting on multiple solutions to the question. We test SelfCheck on three datasets (GSM8K, MathQA, and MATH) and find that it successfully recognizes errors and, in turn, increases final answer accuracies.

The minimax problems arise throughout machine learning applications, ranging from adversarial training and policy evaluation in reinforcement learning to AUROC maximization. To address the large-scale data challenges across multiple clients with communication-efficient distributed training, federated learning (FL) is gaining popularity. Many optimization algorithms for minimax problems have been developed in the centralized setting (\emph{i.e.} single-machine). Nonetheless, the algorithm for minimax problems under FL is still underexplored. In this paper, we study a class of federated nonconvex minimax optimization problems. We propose FL algorithms (FedSGDA+ and FedSGDA-M) and reduce existing complexity results for the most common minimax problems. For nonconvex-concave problems, we propose FedSGDA+ and reduce the communication complexity to $O(\varepsilon^{-6})$. Under nonconvex-strongly-concave and nonconvex-PL minimax settings, we prove that FedSGDA-M has the best-known sample complexity of $O(\kappa^{3} N^{-1}\varepsilon^{-3})$ and the best-known communication complexity of $O(\kappa^{2}\varepsilon^{-2})$. FedSGDA-M is the first algorithm to match the best sample complexity $O(\varepsilon^{-3})$ achieved by the single-machine method under the nonconvex-strongly-concave setting. Extensive experimental results on fair classification and AUROC maximization show the efficiency of our algorithms.

Given a set of $K$ probability densities, we consider the multimarginal generative modeling problem of learning a joint distribution that recovers these densities as marginals. The structure of this joint distribution should identify multi-way correspondences among the prescribed marginals. We formalize an approach to this task within a generalization of the stochastic interpolant framework, leading to efficient learning algorithms built upon dynamical transport of measure. Our generative models are defined by velocity and score fields that can be characterized as the minimizers of simple quadratic objectives, and they are defined on a simplex that generalizes the time variable in the usual dynamical transport framework. The resulting transport on the simplex is influenced by all marginals, and we show that multi-way correspondences can be extracted. The identification of such correspondences has applications to style transfer, algorithmic fairness, and data decorruption. In addition, the multimarginal perspective enables an efficient algorithm for reducing the dynamical transport cost in the ordinary two-marginal setting. We demonstrate these capacities with several numerical examples.

In this paper, we introduce a new heuristics for global optimization in scenarios where extensive evaluations of the cost function are expensive, inaccessible, or even prohibitive. The method, which we call Landscape-Sketch-and-Step (LSS), combines Machine Learning, Stochastic Optimization, and Reinforcement Learning techniques, relying on historical information from previously sampled points to make judicious choices of parameter values where the cost function should be evaluated at. Unlike optimization by Replica Exchange Monte Carlo methods, the number of evaluations of the cost function required in this approach is comparable to that used by Simulated Annealing, quality that is especially important in contexts like high-throughput computing or high-performance computing tasks, where evaluations are either computationally expensive or take a long time to be performed. The method also differs from standard Surrogate Optimization techniques, for it does not construct a surrogate model that aims at approximating or reconstructing the objective function. We illustrate our method by applying it to low dimensional optimization problems (dimensions 1, 2, 4, and 8) that mimick known difficulties of minimization on rugged energy landscapes often seen in Condensed Matter Physics, where cost functions are rugged and plagued with local minima. When compared to classical Simulated Annealing, the LSS shows an effective acceleration of the optimization process.

Objective: Semantic indexing of biomedical literature is usually done at the level of MeSH descriptors with several related but distinct biomedical concepts often grouped together and treated as a single topic. This study proposes a new method for the automated refinement of subject annotations at the level of MeSH concepts. Methods: Lacking labelled data, we rely on weak supervision based on concept occurrence in the abstract of an article, which is also enhanced by dictionary-based heuristics. In addition, we investigate deep learning approaches, making design choices to tackle the particular challenges of this task. The new method is evaluated on a large-scale retrospective scenario, based on concepts that have been promoted to descriptors. Results: In our experiments concept occurrence was the strongest heuristic achieving a macro-F1 score of about 0.63 across several labels. The proposed method improved it further by more than 4pp. Conclusion: The results suggest that concept occurrence is a strong heuristic for refining the coarse-grained labels at the level of MeSH concepts and the proposed method improves it further.

Despite their promise to facilitate new scientific discoveries, the opaqueness of neural networks presents a challenge in interpreting the logic behind their findings. Here, we use a eXplainable-AI (XAI) technique called $inception$ or $deep$ $dreaming$, which has been invented in machine learning for computer vision. We use this technique to explore what neural networks learn about quantum optics experiments. Our story begins by training deep neural networks on the properties of quantum systems. Once trained, we "invert" the neural network -- effectively asking how it imagines a quantum system with a specific property, and how it would continuously modify the quantum system to change a property. We find that the network can shift the initial distribution of properties of the quantum system, and we can conceptualize the learned strategies of the neural network. Interestingly, we find that, in the first layers, the neural network identifies simple properties, while in the deeper ones, it can identify complex quantum structures and even quantum entanglement. This is in reminiscence of long-understood properties known in computer vision, which we now identify in a complex natural science task. Our approach could be useful in a more interpretable way to develop new advanced AI-based scientific discovery techniques in quantum physics.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are typically sample-inefficient, making it challenging to train and deploy RL-policies in real world robots. Even a robust policy trained in simulation requires a real-world deployment to assess their performance. This paper proposes a new approach to evaluate the real-world performance of agent policies prior to deploying them in the real world. Our approach incorporates a simulator along with real-world offline data to evaluate the performance of any policy using the framework of Marginalized Importance Sampling (MIS). Existing MIS methods face two challenges: (1) large density ratios that deviate from a reasonable range and (2) indirect supervision, where the ratio needs to be inferred indirectly, thus exacerbating estimation error. Our approach addresses these challenges by introducing the target policy's occupancy in the simulator as an intermediate variable and learning the density ratio as the product of two terms that can be learned separately. The first term is learned with direct supervision and the second term has a small magnitude, thus making it computationally efficient. We analyze the sample complexity as well as error propagation of our two step-procedure. Furthermore, we empirically evaluate our approach on Sim2Sim environments such as Cartpole, Reacher, and Half-Cheetah. Our results show that our method generalizes well across a variety of Sim2Sim gap, target policies and offline data collection policies. We also demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on a Sim2Real task of validating the performance of a 7 DoF robotic arm using offline data along with the Gazebo simulator.

Like generic multi-task learning, continual learning has the nature of multi-objective optimization, and therefore faces a trade-off between the performance of different tasks. That is, to optimize for the current task distribution, it may need to compromise performance on some previous tasks. This means that there exist multiple models that are Pareto-optimal at different times, each addressing a distinct task performance trade-off. Researchers have discussed how to train particular models to address specific trade-off preferences. However, existing algorithms require training overheads proportional to the number of preferences -- a large burden when there are multiple, possibly infinitely many, preferences. As a response, we propose Imprecise Bayesian Continual Learning (IBCL). Upon a new task, IBCL (1) updates a knowledge base in the form of a convex hull of model parameter distributions and (2) obtains particular models to address task trade-off preferences with zero-shot. That is, IBCL does not require any additional training overhead to generate preference-addressing models from its knowledge base. We show that models obtained by IBCL have guarantees in identifying the Pareto optimal parameters. Moreover, experiments on standard image classification and NLP tasks support this guarantee. Statistically, IBCL improves average per-task accuracy by at most 23\% and peak per-task accuracy by at most 15\% with respect to the baseline methods, with steadily near-zero or positive backward transfer. Most importantly, IBCL significantly reduces the training overhead from training 1 model per preference to at most 3 models for all preferences.

Many believe that Large Language Models (LLMs) open the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Some see opportunities while others see dangers. Yet both proponents and opponents grasp AI through the imagery popularised by science fiction. Will the machine become sentient and rebel against its creators? Will we experience a paperclip apocalypse? Before answering such questions, we should first ask whether this mental imagery provides a good description of the phenomenon at hand. Understanding weather patterns through the moods of the gods only goes so far. The present paper instead advocates understanding LLMs and their connection to AI through the imagery of Jorge Luis Borges, a master of 20th century literature, forerunner of magical realism, and precursor to postmodern literature. This exercise leads to a new perspective that illuminates the relation between language modelling and artificial intelligence.

We present a novel defense, against backdoor attacks on Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), wherein adversaries covertly implant malicious behaviors (backdoors) into DNNs. Our defense falls within the category of post-development defenses that operate independently of how the model was generated. The proposed defense is built upon a novel reverse engineering approach that can directly extract backdoor functionality of a given backdoored model to a backdoor expert model. The approach is straightforward -- finetuning the backdoored model over a small set of intentionally mislabeled clean samples, such that it unlearns the normal functionality while still preserving the backdoor functionality, and thus resulting in a model (dubbed a backdoor expert model) that can only recognize backdoor inputs. Based on the extracted backdoor expert model, we show the feasibility of devising highly accurate backdoor input detectors that filter out the backdoor inputs during model inference. Further augmented by an ensemble strategy with a finetuned auxiliary model, our defense, BaDExpert (Backdoor Input Detection with Backdoor Expert), effectively mitigates 17 SOTA backdoor attacks while minimally impacting clean utility. The effectiveness of BaDExpert has been verified on multiple datasets (CIFAR10, GTSRB and ImageNet) across various model architectures (ResNet, VGG, MobileNetV2 and Vision Transformer).

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are increasingly being used as controllers in reactive systems. However, DNNs are highly opaque, which renders it difficult to explain and justify their actions. To mitigate this issue, there has been a surge of interest in explainable AI (XAI) techniques, capable of pinpointing the input features that caused the DNN to act as it did. Existing XAI techniques typically face two limitations: (i) they are heuristic, and do not provide formal guarantees that the explanations are correct; and (ii) they often apply to ``one-shot'' systems, where the DNN is invoked independently of past invocations, as opposed to reactive systems. Here, we begin bridging this gap, and propose a formal DNN-verification-based XAI technique for reasoning about multi-step, reactive systems. We suggest methods for efficiently calculating succinct explanations, by exploiting the system's transition constraints in order to curtail the search space explored by the underlying verifier. We evaluate our approach on two popular benchmarks from the domain of automated navigation; and observe that our methods allow the efficient computation of minimal and minimum explanations, significantly outperforming the state of the art. We also demonstrate that our methods produce formal explanations that are more reliable than competing, non-verification-based XAI techniques.

Message-passing graph neural networks (MPNNs) emerged as powerful tools for processing graph-structured input. However, they operate on a fixed input graph structure, ignoring potential noise and missing information. Furthermore, their local aggregation mechanism can lead to problems such as over-squashing and limited expressive power in capturing relevant graph structures. Existing solutions to these challenges have primarily relied on heuristic methods, often disregarding the underlying data distribution. Hence, devising principled approaches for learning to infer graph structures relevant to the given prediction task remains an open challenge. In this work, leveraging recent progress in exact and differentiable $k$-subset sampling, we devise probabilistically rewired MPNNs (PR-MPNNs), which learn to add relevant edges while omitting less beneficial ones. For the first time, our theoretical analysis explores how PR-MPNNs enhance expressive power, and we identify precise conditions under which they outperform purely randomized approaches. Empirically, we demonstrate that our approach effectively mitigates issues like over-squashing and under-reaching. In addition, on established real-world datasets, our method exhibits competitive or superior predictive performance compared to traditional MPNN models and recent graph transformer architectures.

Learning from crowds describes that the annotations of training data are obtained with crowd-sourcing services. Multiple annotators each complete their own small part of the annotations, where labeling mistakes that depend on annotators occur frequently. Modeling the label-noise generation process by the noise transition matrix is a power tool to tackle the label noise. In real-world crowd-sourcing scenarios, noise transition matrices are both annotator- and instance-dependent. However, due to the high complexity of annotator- and instance-dependent transition matrices (AIDTM), annotation sparsity, which means each annotator only labels a little part of instances, makes modeling AIDTM very challenging. Prior works simplify the problem by assuming the transition matrix is instance-independent or using simple parametric ways, which lose modeling generality. Motivated by this, we target a more realistic problem, estimating general AIDTM in practice. Without losing modeling generality, we parameterize AIDTM with deep neural networks. To alleviate the modeling challenge, we suppose every annotator shares its noise pattern with similar annotators, and estimate AIDTM via knowledge transfer. We hence first model the mixture of noise patterns by all annotators, and then transfer this modeling to individual annotators. Furthermore, considering that the transfer from the mixture of noise patterns to individuals may cause two annotators with highly different noise generations to perturb each other, we employ the knowledge transfer between identified neighboring annotators to calibrate the modeling. Theoretical analyses are derived to demonstrate that both the knowledge transfer from global to individuals and the knowledge transfer between neighboring individuals can help model general AIDTM. Experiments confirm the superiority of the proposed approach on synthetic and real-world crowd-sourcing data.

Toward robust malware detection, we explore the attack surface of existing malware detection systems. We conduct root-cause analyses of the practical binary-level black-box adversarial malware examples. Additionally, we uncover the sensitivity of volatile features within the detection engines and exhibit their exploitability. Highlighting volatile information channels within the software, we introduce three software pre-processing steps to eliminate the attack surface, namely, padding removal, software stripping, and inter-section information resetting. Further, to counter the emerging section injection attacks, we propose a graph-based section-dependent information extraction scheme for software representation. The proposed scheme leverages aggregated information within various sections in the software to enable robust malware detection and mitigate adversarial settings. Our experimental results show that traditional malware detection models are ineffective against adversarial threats. However, the attack surface can be largely reduced by eliminating the volatile information. Therefore, we propose simple-yet-effective methods to mitigate the impacts of binary manipulation attacks. Overall, our graph-based malware detection scheme can accurately detect malware with an area under the curve score of 88.32\% and a score of 88.19% under a combination of binary manipulation attacks, exhibiting the efficiency of our proposed scheme.

Fluid dynamics computations for tube-like geometries are important for biomedical evaluation of vascular and airway fluid dynamics. Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have recently emerged as a good alternative to traditional computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods. The vanilla PINN, however, requires much longer training time than the traditional CFD methods for each specific flow scenario and thus does not justify its mainstream use. Here, we explore the use of the multi-case PINN approach for calculating biomedical tube flows, where varied geometry cases are parameterized and pre-trained on the PINN, such that results for unseen geometries can be obtained in real time. Our objective is to identify network architecture, tube-specific, and regularization strategies that can optimize this, via experiments on a series of idealized 2D stenotic tube flows.

Graph-level anomaly detection has gained significant attention as it finds many applications in various domains, such as cancer diagnosis and enzyme prediction. However, existing methods fail to capture the underlying properties of graph anomalies, resulting in unexplainable framework design and unsatisfying performance. In this paper, we take a step back and re-investigate the spectral differences between anomalous and normal graphs. Our main observation shows a significant disparity in the accumulated spectral energy between these two classes. Moreover, we prove that the accumulated spectral energy of the graph signal can be represented by its Rayleigh Quotient, indicating that the Rayleigh Quotient is a driving factor behind the anomalous properties of graphs. Motivated by this, we propose Rayleigh Quotient Graph Neural Network (RQGNN), the first spectral GNN for graph-level anomaly detection, providing a new perspective on exploring the inherent spectral features of anomalous graphs. Specifically, we introduce a novel framework that consists of two components: the Rayleigh Quotient learning component (RQL) and Chebyshev Wavelet GNN with RQ-pooling (CWGNN-RQ). RQL explicitly captures the Rayleigh Quotient of graphs and CWGNN-RQ implicitly explores the spectral space of graphs. Extensive experiments on 10 real-world datasets show that RQGNN outperforms the best rival by 6.74% in Macro-F1 score and 1.44% in AUC, demonstrating the effectiveness of our framework.

While significant progress has been made on Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs), a comprehensive comparison of these methods across a wide range of Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) is still lacking. This study introduces PINNacle, a benchmarking tool designed to fill this gap. PINNacle provides a diverse dataset, comprising over 20 distinct PDEs from various domains, including heat conduction, fluid dynamics, biology, and electromagnetics. These PDEs encapsulate key challenges inherent to real-world problems, such as complex geometry, multi-scale phenomena, nonlinearity, and high dimensionality. PINNacle also offers a user-friendly toolbox, incorporating about 10 state-of-the-art PINN methods for systematic evaluation and comparison. We have conducted extensive experiments with these methods, offering insights into their strengths and weaknesses. In addition to providing a standardized means of assessing performance, PINNacle also offers an in-depth analysis to guide future research, particularly in areas such as domain decomposition methods and loss reweighting for handling multi-scale problems and complex geometry. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest benchmark with a diverse and comprehensive evaluation that will undoubtedly foster further research in PINNs.

Procedural Content Generation (PCG) and Procedural Content Generation via Machine Learning (PCGML) have been used in prior work for generating levels in various games. This paper introduces Content Augmentation and focuses on the subproblem of level inpainting, which involves reconstructing and extending video game levels. Drawing inspiration from image inpainting, we adapt two techniques from this domain to address our specific use case. We present two approaches for level inpainting: an Autoencoder and a U-net. Through a comprehensive case study, we demonstrate their superior performance compared to a baseline method and discuss their relative merits. Furthermore, we provide a practical demonstration of both approaches for the level inpainting task and offer insights into potential directions for future research.

Sampling a target probability distribution with an unknown normalization constant is a fundamental challenge in computational science and engineering. Recent work shows that algorithms derived by considering gradient flows in the space of probability measures open up new avenues for algorithm development. This paper makes three contributions to this sampling approach by scrutinizing the design components of such gradient flows. Any instantiation of a gradient flow for sampling needs an energy functional and a metric to determine the flow, as well as numerical approximations of the flow to derive algorithms. Our first contribution is to show that the Kullback-Leibler divergence, as an energy functional, has the unique property (among all f-divergences) that gradient flows resulting from it do not depend on the normalization constant of the target distribution. Our second contribution is to study the choice of metric from the perspective of invariance. The Fisher-Rao metric is known as the unique choice (up to scaling) that is diffeomorphism invariant. As a computationally tractable alternative, we introduce a relaxed, affine invariance property for the metrics and gradient flows. In particular, we construct various affine invariant Wasserstein and Stein gradient flows. Affine invariant gradient flows are shown to behave more favorably than their non-affine-invariant counterparts when sampling highly anisotropic distributions, in theory and by using particle methods. Our third contribution is to study, and develop efficient algorithms based on Gaussian approximations of the gradient flows; this leads to an alternative to particle methods. We establish connections between various Gaussian approximate gradient flows, discuss their relation to gradient methods arising from parametric variational inference, and study their convergence properties both theoretically and numerically.

A myriad of approaches have been proposed to characterise the mesoscale structure of networks - most often as a partition based on patterns variously called communities, blocks, or clusters. Clearly, distinct methods designed to detect different types of patterns may provide a variety of answers to the network's mesoscale structure. Yet, even multiple runs of a given method can sometimes yield diverse and conflicting results, producing entire landscapes of partitions which potentially include multiple (locally optimal) mesoscale explanations of the network. Such ambiguity motivates a closer look at the ability of these methods to find multiple qualitatively different 'ground truth' partitions in a network. Here, we propose the stochastic cross-block model (SCBM), a generative model which allows for two distinct partitions to be built into the mesoscale structure of a single benchmark network. We demonstrate a use case of the benchmark model by appraising the power of stochastic block models (SBMs) to detect implicitly planted coexisting bi-community and core-periphery structures of different strengths. Given our model design and experimental set-up, we find that the ability to detect the two partitions individually varies by SBM variant and that coexistence of both partitions is recovered only in a very limited number of cases. Our findings suggest that in most instances only one - in some way dominating - structure can be detected, even in the presence of other partitions. They underline the need for considering entire landscapes of partitions when different competing explanations exist and motivate future research to advance partition coexistence detection methods. Our model also contributes to the field of benchmark networks more generally by enabling further exploration of the ability of new and existing methods to detect ambiguity in the mesoscale structure of networks.

Numerical weather forecasting using high-resolution physical models often requires extensive computational resources on supercomputers, which diminishes their wide usage in most real-life applications. As a remedy, applying deep learning methods has revealed innovative solutions within this field. To this end, we introduce a novel deep learning architecture for forecasting high-resolution spatio-temporal weather data. Our approach extends the conventional encoder-decoder structure by integrating Convolutional Long-short Term Memory and Convolutional Neural Networks. In addition, we incorporate attention and context matcher mechanisms into the model architecture. Our Weather Model achieves significant performance improvements compared to baseline deep learning models, including ConvLSTM, TrajGRU, and U-Net. Our experimental evaluation involves high-scale, real-world benchmark numerical weather datasets, namely the ERA5 hourly dataset on pressure levels and WeatherBench. Our results demonstrate substantial improvements in identifying spatial and temporal correlations with attention matrices focusing on distinct parts of the input series to model atmospheric circulations. We also compare our model with high-resolution physical models using the benchmark metrics and show that our Weather Model is accurate and easy to interpret.

Thank you very much for the attention and concern of colleagues and scholars in this work. With the comments and guidance of experts, editors, and reviewers, this work has been accepted for publishing in the journal "Process Safety and Environmental Protection". The theme of this paper relies on the Spatial-temporal associations of numerous variables in the same industrial processes, which refers to numerous variables obtained in dynamic industrial processes with Spatial-temporal correlation characteristics, i.e., these variables are not only highly correlated in time but also interrelated in space. To handle this problem, three key issues need to be well addressed: variable characteristics modeling and representation, graph network construction (temporal information), and graph characteristics perception. The first issue is implemented by assuming the data follows one improved Gaussian distribution, while the graph network can be defined by the monitoring variables and their edges which are calculated by their characteristics in time. Finally, these networks corresponding to process states at different times are fed into a graph convolutional neural network to implement graph classification to achieve process monitoring. A benchmark experiment (Tennessee Eastman chemical process) and one application study (cobalt purification from zinc solution) are employed to demonstrate the feasibility and applicability of this paper.

In the 1950s, Barlow and Attneave hypothesised a link between biological vision and information maximisation. Following Shannon, information was defined using the probability of natural images. A number of physiological and psychophysical phenomena have been derived ever since from principles like info-max, efficient coding, or optimal denoising. However, it remains unclear how this link is expressed in mathematical terms from image probability. First, classical derivations were subjected to strong assumptions on the probability models and on the behaviour of the sensors. Moreover, the direct evaluation of the hypothesis was limited by the inability of the classical image models to deliver accurate estimates of the probability. In this work we directly evaluate image probabilities using an advanced generative model for natural images, and we analyse how probability-related factors can be combined to predict human perception via sensitivity of state-of-the-art subjective image quality metrics. We use information theory and regression analysis to find a combination of just two probability-related factors that achieves 0.8 correlation with subjective metrics. This probability-based sensitivity is psychophysically validated by reproducing the basic trends of the Contrast Sensitivity Function, its suprathreshold variation, and trends of the Weber-law and masking.

Evasion Attacks (EA) are used to test the robustness of trained neural networks by distorting input data to misguide the model into incorrect classifications. Creating these attacks is a challenging task, especially with the ever-increasing complexity of models and datasets. In this work, we introduce a self-supervised, computationally economical method for generating adversarial examples, designed for the unseen black-box setting. Adapting techniques from representation learning, our method generates on-manifold EAs that are encouraged to resemble the data distribution. These attacks are comparable in effectiveness compared to the state-of-the-art when attacking the model trained on, but are significantly more effective when attacking unseen models, as the attacks are more related to the data rather than the model itself. Our experiments consistently demonstrate the method is effective across various models, unseen data categories, and even defended models, suggesting a significant role for on-manifold EAs when targeting unseen models.

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) trained with Backpropagation (BP) show astounding performance and are increasingly often used in performing our daily life tasks. However, ANNs are highly vulnerable to adversarial attacks, which alter inputs with small targeted perturbations that drastically disrupt the models' performance. The most effective method to make ANNs robust against these attacks is adversarial training, in which the training dataset is augmented with exemplary adversarial samples. Unfortunately, this approach has the drawback of increased training complexity since generating adversarial samples is very computationally demanding. In contrast to ANNs, humans are not susceptible to adversarial attacks. Therefore, in this work, we investigate whether biologically-plausible learning algorithms are more robust against adversarial attacks than BP. In particular, we present an extensive comparative analysis of the adversarial robustness of BP and Present the Error to Perturb the Input To modulate Activity (PEPITA), a recently proposed biologically-plausible learning algorithm, on various computer vision tasks. We observe that PEPITA has higher intrinsic adversarial robustness and, with adversarial training, has a more favourable natural-vs-adversarial performance trade-off as, for the same natural accuracies, PEPITA's adversarial accuracies decrease in average by 0.26% and BP's by 8.05%.

Finetuned LLMs often exhibit poor uncertainty quantification, manifesting as overconfidence, poor calibration, and unreliable prediction results on test data or out-of-distribution samples. One approach commonly used in vision for alleviating this issue is a deep ensemble, which constructs an ensemble by training the same model multiple times using different random initializations. However, there is a huge challenge to ensembling LLMs: the most effective LLMs are very, very large. Keeping a single LLM in memory is already challenging enough: keeping an ensemble of e.g. 5 LLMs in memory is impossible in many settings. To address these issues, we propose an ensemble approach using Low-Rank Adapters (LoRA), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning technique. Critically, these low-rank adapters represent a very small number of parameters, orders of magnitude less than the underlying pre-trained model. Thus, it is possible to construct large ensembles of LoRA adapters with almost the same computational overhead as using the original model. We find that LoRA ensembles, applied on its own or on top of pre-existing regularization techniques, gives consistent improvements in predictive accuracy and uncertainty quantification.

Simulation-based inference (SBI) methods such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), synthetic likelihood, and neural posterior estimation (NPE) rely on simulating statistics to infer parameters of intractable likelihood models. However, such methods are known to yield untrustworthy and misleading inference outcomes under model misspecification, thus hindering their widespread applicability. In this work, we propose the first general approach to handle model misspecification that works across different classes of SBI methods. Leveraging the fact that the choice of statistics determines the degree of misspecification in SBI, we introduce a regularized loss function that penalises those statistics that increase the mismatch between the data and the model. Taking NPE and ABC as use cases, we demonstrate the superior performance of our method on high-dimensional time-series models that are artificially misspecified. We also apply our method to real data from the field of radio propagation where the model is known to be misspecified. We show empirically that the method yields robust inference in misspecified scenarios, whilst still being accurate when the model is well-specified.

We study the problem of training a flow-based generative model, parametrized by a two-layer autoencoder, to sample from a high-dimensional Gaussian mixture. We provide a sharp end-to-end analysis of the problem. First, we provide a tight closed-form characterization of the learnt velocity field, when parametrized by a shallow denoising auto-encoder trained on a finite number $n$ of samples from the target distribution. Building on this analysis, we provide a sharp description of the corresponding generative flow, which pushes the base Gaussian density forward to an approximation of the target density. In particular, we provide closed-form formulae for the distance between the mean of the generated mixture and the mean of the target mixture, which we show decays as $\Theta_n(\frac{1}{n})$. Finally, this rate is shown to be in fact Bayes-optimal.

Deep learning technology has developed unprecedentedly in the last decade and has become the primary choice in many application domains. This progress is mainly attributed to a systematic collaboration in which rapidly growing computing resources encourage advanced algorithms to deal with massive data. However, it has gradually become challenging to handle the unlimited growth of data with limited computing power. To this end, diverse approaches are proposed to improve data processing efficiency. Dataset distillation, a dataset reduction method, addresses this problem by synthesizing a small typical dataset from substantial data and has attracted much attention from the deep learning community. Existing dataset distillation methods can be taxonomized into meta-learning and data matching frameworks according to whether they explicitly mimic the performance of target data. Although dataset distillation has shown surprising performance in compressing datasets, there are still several limitations such as distilling high-resolution data or data with complex label spaces. This paper provides a holistic understanding of dataset distillation from multiple aspects, including distillation frameworks and algorithms, factorized dataset distillation, performance comparison, and applications. Finally, we discuss challenges and promising directions to further promote future studies on dataset distillation.

Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been the driving force behind many of the recent advances in machine learning. However, research has shown that DNNs are vulnerable to adversarial examples -- input samples that have been perturbed to force DNN-based models to make errors. As a result, Adversarial Machine Learning (AdvML) has gained a lot of attention, and researchers have investigated these vulnerabilities in various settings and modalities. In addition, DNNs have also been found to incorporate embedded bias and often produce unexplainable predictions, which can result in anti-social AI applications. The emergence of new AI technologies that leverage Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT and GPT-4, increases the risk of producing anti-social applications at scale. AdvML for Social Good (AdvML4G) is an emerging field that repurposes the AdvML bug to invent pro-social applications. Regulators, practitioners, and researchers should collaborate to encourage the development of pro-social applications and hinder the development of anti-social ones. In this work, we provide the first comprehensive review of the emerging field of AdvML4G. This paper encompasses a taxonomy that highlights the emergence of AdvML4G, a discussion of the differences and similarities between AdvML4G and AdvML, a taxonomy covering social good-related concepts and aspects, an exploration of the motivations behind the emergence of AdvML4G at the intersection of ML4G and AdvML, and an extensive summary of the works that utilize AdvML4G as an auxiliary tool for innovating pro-social applications. Finally, we elaborate upon various challenges and open research issues that require significant attention from the research community.

Decoding speech from brain activity is a long-awaited goal in both healthcare and neuroscience. Invasive devices have recently led to major milestones in that regard: deep learning algorithms trained on intracranial recordings now start to decode elementary linguistic features (e.g. letters, words, spectrograms). However, extending this approach to natural speech and non-invasive brain recordings remains a major challenge. Here, we introduce a model trained with contrastive-learning to decode self-supervised representations of perceived speech from the non-invasive recordings of a large cohort of healthy individuals. To evaluate this approach, we curate and integrate four public datasets, encompassing 175 volunteers recorded with magneto- or electro-encephalography (M/EEG), while they listened to short stories and isolated sentences. The results show that our model can identify, from 3 seconds of MEG signals, the corresponding speech segment with up to 41% accuracy out of more than 1,000 distinct possibilities on average across participants, and more than 80% in the very best participants - a performance that allows the decoding of words and phrases absent from the training set. The comparison of our model to a variety of baselines highlights the importance of (i) a contrastive objective, (ii) pretrained representations of speech and (iii) a common convolutional architecture simultaneously trained across multiple participants. Finally, the analysis of the decoder's predictions suggests that they primarily depend on lexical and contextual semantic representations. Overall, this effective decoding of perceived speech from non-invasive recordings delineates a promising path to decode language from brain activity, without putting patients at risk for brain surgery.

We study the task of training regression models with the guarantee of label differential privacy (DP). Based on a global prior distribution on label values, which could be obtained privately, we derive a label DP randomization mechanism that is optimal under a given regression loss function. We prove that the optimal mechanism takes the form of a "randomized response on bins", and propose an efficient algorithm for finding the optimal bin values. We carry out a thorough experimental evaluation on several datasets demonstrating the efficacy of our algorithm.

We present Deep Region Competition (DRC), an algorithm designed to extract foreground objects from images in a fully unsupervised manner. Foreground extraction can be viewed as a special case of generic image segmentation that focuses on identifying and disentangling objects from the background. In this work, we rethink the foreground extraction by reconciling energy-based prior with generative image modeling in the form of Mixture of Experts (MoE), where we further introduce the learned pixel re-assignment as the essential inductive bias to capture the regularities of background regions. With this modeling, the foreground-background partition can be naturally found through Expectation-Maximization (EM). We show that the proposed method effectively exploits the interaction between the mixture components during the partitioning process, which closely connects to region competition, a seminal approach for generic image segmentation. Experiments demonstrate that DRC exhibits more competitive performances on complex real-world data and challenging multi-object scenes compared with prior methods. Moreover, we show empirically that DRC can potentially generalize to novel foreground objects even from categories unseen during training.

In this paper we introduce some new algebraic and geometric perspectives on networked space communications. Our main contribution is a novel definition of a time-varying graph (TVG), defined in terms of a matrix with values in subsets of the real line P(R). We leverage semi-ring properties of P(R) to model multi-hop communication in a TVG using matrix multiplication and a truncated Kleene star. This leads to novel statistics on the communication capacity of TVGs called lifetime curves, which we generate for large samples of randomly chosen STARLINK satellites, whose connectivity is modeled over day-long simulations. Determining when a large subsample of STARLINK is temporally strongly connected is further analyzed using novel metrics introduced here that are inspired by topological data analysis (TDA). To better model networking scenarios between the Earth and Mars, we introduce various semi-rings capable of modeling propagation delay as well as protocols common to Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN), such as store-and-forward. Finally, we illustrate the applicability of zigzag persistence for featurizing different space networks and demonstrate the efficacy of K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN) classification for distinguishing Earth-Mars and Earth-Moon satellite systems using time-varying topology alone.

The multivariate Hawkes process (MHP) is widely used for analyzing data streams that interact with each other, where events generate new events within their own dimension (via self-excitation) or across different dimensions (via cross-excitation). However, in certain applications, the timestamps of individual events in some dimensions are unobservable, and only event counts within intervals are known, referred to as partially interval-censored data. The MHP is unsuitable for handling such data since its estimation requires event timestamps. In this study, we introduce the Partial Mean Behavior Poisson (PMBP) process, a novel point process which shares parameter equivalence with the MHP and can effectively model both timestamped and interval-censored data. We demonstrate the capabilities of the PMBP process using synthetic and real-world datasets. Firstly, we illustrate that the PMBP process can approximate MHP parameters and recover the spectral radius using synthetic event histories. Next, we assess the performance of the PMBP process in predicting YouTube popularity and find that it surpasses state-of-the-art methods. Lastly, we leverage the PMBP process to gain qualitative insights from a dataset comprising daily COVID-19 case counts from multiple countries and COVID-19-related news articles. By clustering the PMBP-modeled countries, we unveil hidden interaction patterns between occurrences of COVID-19 cases and news reporting.

Diffusion models are a powerful class of generative models which simulate stochastic differential equations (SDEs) to generate data from noise. Although diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in recent years, they have limitations in the unpaired image-to-image translation tasks due to the Gaussian prior assumption. Schr\"odinger Bridge (SB), which learns an SDE to translate between two arbitrary distributions, have risen as an attractive solution to this problem. However, none of SB models so far have been successful at unpaired translation between high-resolution images. In this work, we propose the Unpaired Neural Schr\"odinger Bridge (UNSB), which expresses SB problem as a sequence of adversarial learning problems. This allows us to incorporate advanced discriminators and regularization to learn a SB between unpaired data. We demonstrate that UNSB is scalable and successfully solves various unpaired image-to-image translation tasks. Code: \url{https://github.com/cyclomon/UNSB}

Machine learning algorithms have grown in sophistication over the years and are increasingly deployed for real-life applications. However, when using machine learning techniques in practical settings, particularly in high-risk applications such as medicine and engineering, obtaining the failure probability of the predictive model is critical. We refer to this problem as the risk-assessment task. We focus on regression algorithms and the risk-assessment task of computing the probability of the true label lying inside an interval defined around the model's prediction. We solve the risk-assessment problem using the conformal prediction approach, which provides prediction intervals that are guaranteed to contain the true label with a given probability. Using this coverage property, we prove that our approximated failure probability is conservative in the sense that it is not lower than the true failure probability of the ML algorithm. We conduct extensive experiments to empirically study the accuracy of the proposed method for problems with and without covariate shift. Our analysis focuses on different modeling regimes, dataset sizes, and conformal prediction methodologies.

Real-world deployment of machine learning models is challenging because data evolves over time. While no model can work when data evolves in an arbitrary fashion, if there is some pattern to these changes, we might be able to design methods to address it. This paper addresses situations when data evolves gradually. We introduce a time-varying propensity score that can detect gradual shifts in the distribution of data which allows us to selectively sample past data to update the model -- not just similar data from the past like that of a standard propensity score but also data that evolved in a similar fashion in the past. The time-varying propensity score is quite general: we demonstrate different ways of implementing it and evaluate it on a variety of problems ranging from supervised learning (e.g., image classification problems) where data undergoes a sequence of gradual shifts, to reinforcement learning tasks (e.g., robotic manipulation and continuous control) where data shifts as the policy or the task changes.

We propose a federated averaging Langevin algorithm (FA-LD) for uncertainty quantification and mean predictions with distributed clients. In particular, we generalize beyond normal posterior distributions and consider a general class of models. We develop theoretical guarantees for FA-LD for strongly log-concave distributions with non-i.i.d data and study how the injected noise and the stochastic-gradient noise, the heterogeneity of data, and the varying learning rates affect the convergence. Such an analysis sheds light on the optimal choice of local updates to minimize communication costs. Important to our approach is that the communication efficiency does not deteriorate with the injected noise in the Langevin algorithms. In addition, we examine in our FA-LD algorithm both independent and correlated noise used over different clients. We observe there is a trade-off between the pairs among communication, accuracy, and data privacy. As local devices may become inactive in federated networks, we also show convergence results based on different averaging schemes where only partial device updates are available. In such a case, we discover an additional bias that does not decay to zero.

There is a niche of companies responsible for intermediating the purchase of large batches of varied products for other companies, for which the main challenge is to perform product description standardization, i.e., matching an item described by a client with a product described in a catalog. The problem is complex since the client's product description may be: (1) potentially noisy; (2) short and uninformative (e.g., missing information about model and size); and (3) cross-language. In this paper, we formalize this problem as a ranking task: given an initial client product specification (query), return the most appropriate standardized descriptions (response). In this paper, we propose TPDR, a two-step Transformer-based Product and Class Description Retrieval method that is able to explore the semantic correspondence between IS and SD, by exploiting attention mechanisms and contrastive learning. First, TPDR employs the transformers as two encoders sharing the embedding vector space: one for encoding the IS and another for the SD, in which corresponding pairs (IS, SD) must be close in the vector space. Closeness is further enforced by a contrastive learning mechanism leveraging a specialized loss function. TPDR also exploits a (second) re-ranking step based on syntactic features that are very important for the exact matching (model, dimension) of certain products that may have been neglected by the transformers. To evaluate our proposal, we consider 11 datasets from a real company, covering different application contexts. Our solution was able to retrieve the correct standardized product before the 5th ranking position in 71% of the cases and its correct category in the first position in 80% of the situations. Moreover, the effectiveness gains over purely syntactic or semantic baselines reach up to 3.7 times, solving cases that none of the approaches in isolation can do by themselves.

Posterior sampling has been shown to be a powerful Bayesian approach for solving imaging inverse problems. The recent plug-and-play unadjusted Langevin algorithm (PnP-ULA) has emerged as a promising method for Monte Carlo sampling and minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimation by combining physical measurement models with deep-learning priors specified using image denoisers. However, the intricate relationship between the sampling distribution of PnP-ULA and the mismatched data-fidelity and denoiser has not been theoretically analyzed. We address this gap by proposing a posterior-L2 pseudometric and using it to quantify an explicit error bound for PnP-ULA under mismatched posterior distribution. We numerically validate our theory on several inverse problems such as sampling from Gaussian mixture models and image deblurring. Our results suggest that the sensitivity of the sampling distribution of PnP-ULA to a mismatch in the measurement model and the denoiser can be precisely characterized.

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets) are amortized samplers that learn stochastic policies to sequentially generate compositional objects from a given unnormalized reward distribution. They can generate diverse sets of high-reward objects, which is an important consideration in scientific discovery tasks. However, as they are typically trained from a given extrinsic reward function, it remains an important open challenge about how to leverage the power of pre-training and train GFlowNets in an unsupervised fashion for efficient adaptation to downstream tasks. Inspired by recent successes of unsupervised pre-training in various domains, we introduce a novel approach for reward-free pre-training of GFlowNets. By framing the training as a self-supervised problem, we propose an outcome-conditioned GFlowNet (OC-GFN) that learns to explore the candidate space. Specifically, OC-GFN learns to reach any targeted outcomes, akin to goal-conditioned policies in reinforcement learning. We show that the pre-trained OC-GFN model can allow for a direct extraction of a policy capable of sampling from any new reward functions in downstream tasks. Nonetheless, adapting OC-GFN on a downstream task-specific reward involves an intractable marginalization over possible outcomes. We propose a novel way to approximate this marginalization by learning an amortized predictor enabling efficient fine-tuning. Extensive experimental results validate the efficacy of our approach, demonstrating the effectiveness of pre-training the OC-GFN, and its ability to swiftly adapt to downstream tasks and discover modes more efficiently. This work may serve as a foundation for further exploration of pre-training strategies in the context of GFlowNets.

Despite the recent emergence of video captioning models, how to generate vivid, fine-grained video descriptions based on the background knowledge (i.e., long and informative commentary about the domain-specific scenes with appropriate reasoning) is still far from being solved, which however has great applications such as automatic sports narrative. In this paper, we present GOAL, a benchmark of over 8.9k soccer video clips, 22k sentences, and 42k knowledge triples for proposing a challenging new task setting as Knowledge-grounded Video Captioning (KGVC). Moreover, we conduct experimental adaption of existing methods to show the difficulty and potential directions for solving this valuable and applicable task. Our data and code are available at https://github.com/THU-KEG/goal.

Graph neural networks (GNNs) learn the representation of nodes in a graph by aggregating the neighborhood information in various ways. As these networks grow in depth, their receptive field grows exponentially due to the increase in neighborhood sizes, resulting in high memory costs. Graph sampling solves memory issues in GNNs by sampling a small ratio of the nodes in the graph. This way, GNNs can scale to much larger graphs. Most sampling methods focus on fixed sampling heuristics, which may not generalize to different structures or tasks. We introduce GRAPES, an adaptive graph sampling method that learns to identify sets of influential nodes for training a GNN classifier. GRAPES uses a GFlowNet to learn node sampling probabilities given the classification objectives. We evaluate GRAPES across several small- and large-scale graph benchmarks and demonstrate its effectiveness in accuracy and scalability. In contrast to existing sampling methods, GRAPES maintains high accuracy even with small sample sizes and, therefore, can scale to very large graphs. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/dfdazac/grapes.

Nowadays, billions of people engage in communication and express their opinions on the internet daily. Unfortunately, not all of these expressions are friendly or compliant, making content moderation an indispensable task. With the successful development of Large Language Models (LLMs) in recent years, LLM-based methods have become a feasible solution for handling tasks in various domains. However, in the field of content moderation, there is still a lack of detailed work that systematically introduces implementation details. In this paper, we introduce how to fine-tune an LLM model that can be privately deployed for content moderation. Specifically, we discuss whether incorporating reasons during the fine-tuning process would be better or if it should be treated as a classification task directly. We also explore the benefits of utilizing reasons generated by more powerful LLMs for fine-tuning privately deployed models and the impact of different processing approaches when the answers generated by the more powerful LLMs are incorrect. We report the entire research process and the key findings in this paper, hoping to provide valuable experience for researchers who are fine-tuning privately deployed models in their domain-specific research.

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) provides a foundation model by integrating natural language into visual concepts, enabling zero-shot recognition on downstream tasks. It is usually expected that satisfactory overall accuracy can be achieved across numerous domains through well-designed textual prompts. However, we found that their performance in the worst categories is significantly inferior to the overall performance. For example, on ImageNet, there are a total of 10 categories with class-wise accuracy as low as 0\%, even though the overall performance has achieved 64.1\%. This phenomenon reveals the potential risks associated with using CLIP models, particularly in risk-sensitive applications where specific categories hold significant importance. To address this issue, we investigate the alignment between the two modalities in the CLIP model and propose the Class-wise Matching Margin (\cmm) to measure the inference confusion. \cmm\ can effectively identify the worst-performing categories and estimate the potential performance of the candidate prompts. We further query large language models to enrich descriptions of worst-performing categories and build a weighted ensemble to highlight the efficient prompts. Experimental results clearly verify the effectiveness of our proposal, where the accuracy on the worst-10 categories on ImageNet is boosted to 5.2\%, without manual prompt engineering, laborious optimization, or access to labeled validation data.

Deep learning-based numerical schemes for solving high-dimensional backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs) have recently raised plenty of scientific interest. While they enable numerical methods to approximate very high-dimensional BSDEs, their reliability has not been studied and is thus not understood. In this work, we study uncertainty quantification (UQ) for a class of deep learning-based BSDE schemes. More precisely, we review the sources of uncertainty involved in the schemes and numerically study the impact of different sources. Usually, the standard deviation (STD) of the approximate solutions obtained from multiple runs of the algorithm with different datasets is calculated to address the uncertainty. This approach is computationally quite expensive, especially for high-dimensional problems. Hence, we develop a UQ model that efficiently estimates the STD of the approximate solution using only a single run of the algorithm. The model also estimates the mean of the approximate solution, which can be leveraged to initialize the algorithm and improve the optimization process. Our numerical experiments show that the UQ model produces reliable estimates of the mean and STD of the approximate solution for the considered class of deep learning-based BSDE schemes. The estimated STD captures multiple sources of uncertainty, demonstrating its effectiveness in quantifying the uncertainty. Additionally, the model illustrates the improved performance when comparing different schemes based on the estimated STD values. Furthermore, it can identify hyperparameter values for which the scheme achieves good approximations.

Probabilistic modelling of power systems operation and planning processes depends on data-driven methods, which require sufficiently large datasets. When historical data lacks this, it is desired to model the underlying data generation mechanism as a probability distribution to assess the data quality and generate more data, if needed. Kernel density estimation (KDE) based models are popular choices for this task, but they fail to adapt to data regions with varying densities. In this paper, an adaptive KDE model is employed to circumvent this, where each kernel in the model has an individual bandwidth. The leave-one-out maximum log-likelihood (LOO-MLL) criterion is proposed to prevent the singular solutions that the regular MLL criterion gives rise to, and it is proven that LOO-MLL prevents these. Relying on this guaranteed robustness, the model is extended by assigning learnable weights to the kernels. In addition, a modified expectation-maximization algorithm is employed to accelerate the optimization speed reliably. The performance of the proposed method and models are exhibited on two power systems datasets using different statistical tests and by comparison with Gaussian mixture models. Results show that the proposed models have promising performance, in addition to their singularity prevention guarantees.

Multi-fidelity (MF) methods are gaining popularity for enhancing surrogate modeling and design optimization by incorporating data from various low-fidelity (LF) models. While most existing MF methods assume a fixed dataset, adaptive sampling methods that dynamically allocate resources among fidelity models can achieve higher efficiency in the exploring and exploiting the design space. However, most existing MF methods rely on the hierarchical assumption of fidelity levels or fail to capture the intercorrelation between multiple fidelity levels and utilize it to quantify the value of the future samples and navigate the adaptive sampling. To address this hurdle, we propose a framework hinged on a latent embedding for different fidelity models and the associated pre-posterior analysis to explicitly utilize their correlation for adaptive sampling. In this framework, each infill sampling iteration includes two steps: We first identify the location of interest with the greatest potential improvement using the high-fidelity (HF) model, then we search for the next sample across all fidelity levels that maximize the improvement per unit cost at the location identified in the first step. This is made possible by a single Latent Variable Gaussian Process (LVGP) model that maps different fidelity models into an interpretable latent space to capture their correlations without assuming hierarchical fidelity levels. The LVGP enables us to assess how LF sampling candidates will affect HF response with pre-posterior analysis and determine the next sample with the best benefit-to-cost ratio. Through test cases, we demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the benchmark methods in both MF global fitting (GF) and Bayesian Optimization (BO) problems in convergence rate and robustness. Moreover, the method offers the flexibility to switch between GF and BO by simply changing the acquisition function.

Evaluating the readability of a text can significantly facilitate the precise expression of information in written form. The formulation of text readability assessment involves the identification of meaningful properties of the text regardless of its length. Sophisticated features and models are used to evaluate the comprehensibility of texts accurately. Despite this, the problem of assessing texts' readability efficiently remains relatively untouched. The efficiency of state-of-the-art text readability assessment models can be further improved using deep reinforcement learning models. Using a hard attention-based active inference technique, the proposed approach makes efficient use of input text and computational resources. Through the use of semi-supervised signals, the reinforcement learning model uses the minimum amount of text in order to determine text's readability. A comparison of the model on Weebit and Cambridge Exams with state-of-the-art models, such as the BERT text readability model, shows that it is capable of achieving state-of-the-art accuracy with a significantly smaller amount of input text than other models.

We study model pruning methods applied to Transformer-based neural network language models for automatic speech recognition. We explore three aspects of the pruning frame work, namely criterion, method and scheduler, analyzing their contribution in terms of accuracy and inference speed. To the best of our knowledge, such in-depth analyses on large-scale recognition systems has not been reported in the literature. In addition, we propose a variant of low-rank approximation suitable for incrementally compressing models, and delivering multiple models with varied target sizes. Among other results, we show that a) data-driven pruning outperforms magnitude-driven in several scenarios; b) incremental pruning achieves higher accuracy compared to one-shot pruning, especially when targeting smaller sizes; and c) low-rank approximation presents the best trade-off between size reduction and inference speed-up for moderate compression.

Accurate forecasts of electricity prices are crucial for the management of electric power systems and the development of smart applications. European electricity prices have risen substantially and became highly volatile after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, challenging established forecasting methods. Here, we present a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) model for the German-Luxembourg day-ahead electricity prices addressing these challenges. The recurrent structure of the LSTM allows the model to adapt to trends, while the joint prediction of both mean and standard deviation enables a probabilistic prediction. Using a physics-inspired approach - superstatistics - to derive an explanation for the statistics of prices, we show that the LSTM model faithfully reproduces both prices and their volatility.

Problem Definition: Are traditional deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms, developed for a broad range of purposes including game-play and robotics, the most suitable machine learning algorithms for applications in inventory control? To what extent would DRL algorithms tailored to the unique characteristics of inventory control problems provide superior performance compared to DRL and traditional benchmarks? Methodology/results: We propose and study Deep Controlled Learning (DCL), a new DRL framework based on approximate policy iteration specifically designed to tackle inventory problems. Comparative evaluations reveal that DCL outperforms existing state-of-the-art heuristics in lost sales inventory control, perishable inventory systems, and inventory systems with random lead times, achieving lower average costs across all test instances and maintaining an optimality gap of no more than 0.1\%. Notably, the same hyperparameter set is utilized across all experiments, underscoring the robustness and generalizability of the proposed method. Managerial implications: These substantial performance and robustness improvements pave the way for the effective application of tailored DRL algorithms to inventory management problems, empowering decision-makers to optimize stock levels, minimize costs, and enhance responsiveness across various industries.

Weight decay is a standard technique to improve generalization performance in modern deep neural network optimization, and is also widely adopted in federated learning (FL) to prevent overfitting in local clients. In this paper, we first explore the choices of weight decay and identify that weight decay value appreciably influences the convergence of existing FL algorithms. While preventing overfitting is crucial, weight decay can introduce a different optimization goal towards the global objective, which is further amplified in FL due to multiple local updates and heterogeneous data distribution. To address this challenge, we develop {\it Federated optimization with Normalized Annealing Regularization} (FedNAR), a simple yet effective and versatile algorithmic plug-in that can be seamlessly integrated into any existing FL algorithms. Essentially, we regulate the magnitude of each update by performing co-clipping of the gradient and weight decay. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of FedNAR's convergence rate and conduct extensive experiments on both vision and language datasets with different backbone federated optimization algorithms. Our experimental results consistently demonstrate that incorporating FedNAR into existing FL algorithms leads to accelerated convergence and heightened model accuracy. Moreover, FedNAR exhibits resilience in the face of various hyperparameter configurations. Specifically, FedNAR has the ability to self-adjust the weight decay when the initial specification is not optimal, while the accuracy of traditional FL algorithms would markedly decline. Our codes are released at \href{https://github.com/ljb121002/fednar}{https://github.com/ljb121002/fednar}.

Autonomous robots must navigate reliably in unknown environments even under compromised exteroceptive perception, or perception failures. Such failures often occur when harsh environments lead to degraded sensing, or when the perception algorithm misinterprets the scene due to limited generalization. In this paper, we model perception failures as invisible obstacles and pits, and train a reinforcement learning (RL) based local navigation policy to guide our legged robot. Unlike previous works relying on heuristics and anomaly detection to update navigational information, we train our navigation policy to reconstruct the environment information in the latent space from corrupted perception and react to perception failures end-to-end. To this end, we incorporate both proprioception and exteroception into our policy inputs, thereby enabling the policy to sense collisions on different body parts and pits, prompting corresponding reactions. We validate our approach in simulation and on the real quadruped robot ANYmal running in real-time (<10 ms CPU inference). In a quantitative comparison with existing heuristic-based locally reactive planners, our policy increases the success rate over 30% when facing perception failures. Project Page: https://bit.ly/45NBTuh.

In this paper, we introduce TimeGPT, the first foundation model for time series, capable of generating accurate predictions for diverse datasets not seen during training. We evaluate our pre-trained model against established statistical, machine learning, and deep learning methods, demonstrating that TimeGPT zero-shot inference excels in performance, efficiency, and simplicity. Our study provides compelling evidence that insights from other domains of artificial intelligence can be effectively applied to time series analysis. We conclude that large-scale time series models offer an exciting opportunity to democratize access to precise predictions and reduce uncertainty by leveraging the capabilities of contemporary advancements in deep learning.

Numerical models of electromyographic (EMG) signals have provided a huge contribution to our fundamental understanding of human neurophysiology and remain a central pillar of motor neuroscience and the development of human-machine interfaces. However, whilst modern biophysical simulations based on finite element methods are highly accurate, they are extremely computationally expensive and thus are generally limited to modelling static systems such as isometrically contracting limbs. As a solution to this problem, we propose a transfer learning approach, in which a conditional generative model is trained to mimic the output of an advanced numerical model. To this end, we present BioMime, a conditional generative neural network trained adversarially to generate motor unit activation potential waveforms under a wide variety of volume conductor parameters. We demonstrate the ability of such a model to predictively interpolate between a much smaller number of numerical model's outputs with a high accuracy. Consequently, the computational load is dramatically reduced, which allows the rapid simulation of EMG signals during truly dynamic and naturalistic movements.

The 5' UTR, a regulatory region at the beginning of an mRNA molecule, plays a crucial role in regulating the translation process and impacts the protein expression level. Language models have showcased their effectiveness in decoding the functions of protein and genome sequences. Here, we introduced a language model for 5' UTR, which we refer to as the UTR-LM. The UTR-LM is pre-trained on endogenous 5' UTRs from multiple species and is further augmented with supervised information including secondary structure and minimum free energy. We fine-tuned the UTR-LM in a variety of downstream tasks. The model outperformed the best-known benchmark by up to 42% for predicting the Mean Ribosome Loading, and by up to 60% for predicting the Translation Efficiency and the mRNA Expression Level. The model also applies to identifying unannotated Internal Ribosome Entry Sites within the untranslated region and improves the AUPR from 0.37 to 0.52 compared to the best baseline. Further, we designed a library of 211 novel 5' UTRs with high predicted values of translation efficiency and evaluated them via a wet-lab assay. Experiment results confirmed that our top designs achieved a 32.5% increase in protein production level relative to well-established 5' UTR optimized for therapeutics.

Bayesian optimization is an effective method for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. High-dimensional problems are particularly challenging as the surrogate model of the objective suffers from the curse of dimensionality, which makes accurate modeling difficult. We propose a group testing approach to identify active variables to facilitate efficient optimization in these domains. The proposed algorithm, Group Testing Bayesian Optimization (GTBO), first runs a testing phase where groups of variables are systematically selected and tested on whether they influence the objective. To that end, we extend the well-established theory of group testing to functions of continuous ranges. In the second phase, GTBO guides optimization by placing more importance on the active dimensions. By exploiting the axis-aligned subspace assumption, GTBO is competitive against state-of-the-art methods on several synthetic and real-world high-dimensional optimization tasks. Furthermore, GTBO aids in the discovery of active parameters in applications, thereby enhancing practitioners' understanding of the problem at hand.

Privacy and Byzantine resilience (BR) are two crucial requirements of modern-day distributed machine learning. The two concepts have been extensively studied individually but the question of how to combine them effectively remains unanswered. This paper contributes to addressing this question by studying the extent to which the distributed SGD algorithm, in the standard parameter-server architecture, can learn an accurate model despite (a) a fraction of the workers being malicious (Byzantine), and (b) the other fraction, whilst being honest, providing noisy information to the server to ensure differential privacy (DP). We first observe that the integration of standard practices in DP and BR is not straightforward. In fact, we show that many existing results on the convergence of distributed SGD under Byzantine faults, especially those relying on $(\alpha,f)$-Byzantine resilience, are rendered invalid when honest workers enforce DP. To circumvent this shortcoming, we revisit the theory of $(\alpha,f)$-BR to obtain an approximate convergence guarantee. Our analysis provides key insights on how to improve this guarantee through hyperparameter optimization. Essentially, our theoretical and empirical results show that (1) an imprudent combination of standard approaches to DP and BR might be fruitless, but (2) by carefully re-tuning the learning algorithm, we can obtain reasonable learning accuracy while simultaneously guaranteeing DP and BR.

Scientific experimentation involves an iterative process of creating hypotheses, designing experiments, running experiments, and analyzing the results. Can we build AI research agents to perform these long-horizon tasks? To take a step towards building and evaluating research agents on such open-ended decision-making tasks, we focus on the problem of machine learning engineering: given a task description and a dataset, build a high-performing model. In this paper, we propose MLAgentBench, a suite of ML tasks for benchmarking AI research agents. Agents can perform actions like reading/writing files, executing code, and inspecting outputs. With these actions, agents could run experiments, analyze the results, and modify the code of entire machine learning pipelines, such as data processing, architecture, training processes, etc. The benchmark then automatically evaluates the agent's performance objectively over various metrics related to performance and efficiency. We also design an LLM-based research agent to automatically perform experimentation loops in such an environment. Empirically, we find that a GPT-4-based research agent can feasibly build compelling ML models over many tasks in MLAgentBench, displaying highly interpretable plans and actions. However, the success rates vary considerably; they span from almost 90\% on well-established older datasets to as low as 10\% on recent Kaggle Challenges -- unavailable during the LLM model's pretraining -- and even 0\% on newer research challenges like BabyLM. Finally, we identify several key challenges for LLM-based research agents such as long-term planning and hallucination. Our code is released at https://github.com/snap-stanford/MLAgentBench.

Interpretability methods are valuable only if their explanations faithfully describe the explained model. In this work, we consider neural networks whose predictions are invariant under a specific symmetry group. This includes popular architectures, ranging from convolutional to graph neural networks. Any explanation that faithfully explains this type of model needs to be in agreement with this invariance property. We formalize this intuition through the notion of explanation invariance and equivariance by leveraging the formalism from geometric deep learning. Through this rigorous formalism, we derive (1) two metrics to measure the robustness of any interpretability method with respect to the model symmetry group; (2) theoretical robustness guarantees for some popular interpretability methods and (3) a systematic approach to increase the invariance of any interpretability method with respect to a symmetry group. By empirically measuring our metrics for explanations of models associated with various modalities and symmetry groups, we derive a set of 5 guidelines to allow users and developers of interpretability methods to produce robust explanations.

Moving deep learning models from the laboratory setting to the open world entails preparing them to handle unforeseen conditions. In several applications the occurrence of novel classes during deployment poses a significant threat, thus it is crucial to effectively detect them. Ideally, this skill should be used when needed without requiring any further computational training effort at every new task. Out-of-distribution detection has attracted significant attention in the last years, however the majority of the studies deal with 2D images ignoring the inherent 3D nature of the real-world and often confusing between domain and semantic novelty. In this work, we focus on the latter, considering the objects geometric structure captured by 3D point clouds regardless of the specific domain. We advance the field by introducing OpenPatch that builds on a large pre-trained model and simply extracts from its intermediate features a set of patch representations that describe each known class. For any new sample, we obtain a novelty score by evaluating whether it can be recomposed mainly by patches of a single known class or rather via the contribution of multiple classes. We present an extensive experimental evaluation of our approach for the task of semantic novelty detection on real-world point cloud samples when the reference known data are synthetic. We demonstrate that OpenPatch excels in both the full and few-shot known sample scenarios, showcasing its robustness across varying pre-training objectives and network backbones. The inherent training-free nature of our method allows for its immediate application to a wide array of real-world tasks, offering a compelling advantage over approaches that need expensive retraining efforts.

Recently there has been increasing interest in developing and deploying deep graph learning algorithms for many tasks, such as fraud detection and recommender systems. Albeit, there is a limited number of publicly available graph-structured datasets, most of which are tiny compared to production-sized applications or are limited in their application domain. This work tackles this shortcoming by proposing a scalable synthetic graph generation tool to scale the datasets to production-size graphs with trillions of edges and billions of nodes. The tool learns a series of parametric models from proprietary datasets that can be released to researchers to study various graph methods on the synthetic data increasing prototype development and novel applications. We demonstrate the generalizability of the framework across a series of datasets, mimicking structural and feature distributions as well as the ability to scale them across varying sizes demonstrating their usefulness for benchmarking and model development. Code can be found on https://github.com/NVIDIA/DeepLearningExamples/tree/master/Tools/DGLPyTorch/SyntheticGraphGeneration.

Pretrained large language models (LLMs) are general purpose problem solvers applicable to a diverse set of tasks with prompts. They can be further improved towards a specific task by fine-tuning on a specialized dataset. However, fine-tuning usually makes the model narrowly specialized on this dataset with reduced general in-context learning performances, which is undesirable whenever the fine-tuned model needs to handle additional tasks where no fine-tuning data is available. In this work, we first demonstrate that fine-tuning on a single task indeed decreases LLMs' general in-context learning performance. We discover one important cause of such forgetting, format specialization, where the model overfits to the format of the fine-tuned task. We further show that format specialization happens at the very beginning of fine-tuning. To solve this problem, we propose Prompt Tuning with MOdel Tuning (ProMoT), a simple yet effective two-stage fine-tuning framework that reduces format specialization and improves generalization. ProMoT offloads task-specific format learning into additional and removable parameters by first doing prompt tuning and then fine-tuning the model itself with this soft prompt attached. With experiments on several fine-tuning tasks and 8 in-context evaluation tasks, we show that ProMoT achieves comparable performance on fine-tuned tasks to standard fine-tuning, but with much less loss of in-context learning performances across a board range of out-of-domain evaluation tasks. More importantly, ProMoT can even enhance generalization on in-context learning tasks that are semantically related to the fine-tuned task, e.g. ProMoT on En-Fr translation significantly improves performance on other language pairs, and ProMoT on NLI improves performance on summarization. Experiments also show that ProMoT can improve the generalization performance of multi-task training.

Adversarial attacks have the potential to mislead deep neural network classifiers by introducing slight perturbations. Developing algorithms that can mitigate the effects of these attacks is crucial for ensuring the safe use of artificial intelligence. Recent studies have suggested that score-based diffusion models are effective in adversarial defenses. However, existing diffusion-based defenses rely on the sequential simulation of the reversed stochastic differential equations of diffusion models, which are computationally inefficient and yield suboptimal results. In this paper, we introduce a novel adversarial defense scheme named ScoreOpt, which optimizes adversarial samples at test-time, towards original clean data in the direction guided by score-based priors. We conduct comprehensive experiments on multiple datasets, including CIFAR10, CIFAR100 and ImageNet. Our experimental results demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing adversarial defenses in terms of both robustness performance and inference speed.

Traffic signs play a critical role in road safety and traffic management for autonomous driving systems. Accurate traffic sign classification is essential but challenging due to real-world complexities like adversarial examples and occlusions. To address these issues, binary neural networks offer promise in constructing classifiers suitable for resource-constrained devices. In our previous work, we proposed high-accuracy BNN models for traffic sign recognition, focusing on compact size for limited computation and energy resources. To evaluate their local robustness, this paper introduces a set of benchmark problems featuring layers that challenge state-of-the-art verification tools. These layers include binarized convolutions, max pooling, batch normalization, fully connected. The difficulty of the verification problem is given by the high number of network parameters (905k - 1.7 M), of the input dimension (2.7k-12k), and of the number of regions (43) as well by the fact that the neural networks are not sparse. The proposed BNN models and local robustness properties can be checked at https://github.com/ChristopherBrix/vnncomp2023_benchmarks/tree/main/benchmarks/traffic_signs_recognition. The results of the 4th International Verification of Neural Networks Competition (VNN-COMP'23) revealed the fact that 4, out of 7, solvers can handle many of our benchmarks randomly selected (minimum is 6, maximum is 36, out of 45). Surprisingly, tools output also wrong results or missing counterexample (ranging from 1 to 4). Currently, our focus lies in exploring the possibility of achieving a greater count of solved instances by extending the allotted time (previously set at 8 minutes). Furthermore, we are intrigued by the reasons behind the erroneous outcomes provided by the tools for certain benchmarks.

This literature review aimed to compare various time-series analysis approaches utilized in forecasting COVID-19 cases in Africa. The study involved a methodical search for English-language research papers published between January 2020 and July 2023, focusing specifically on papers that utilized time-series analysis approaches on COVID-19 datasets in Africa. A variety of databases including PubMed, Google Scholar, Scopus, and Web of Science were utilized for this process. The research papers underwent an evaluation process to extract relevant information regarding the implementation and performance of the time-series analysis models. The study highlighted the different methodologies employed, evaluating their effectiveness and limitations in forecasting the spread of the virus. The result of this review could contribute deeper insights into the field, and future research should consider these insights to improve time series analysis models and explore the integration of different approaches for enhanced public health decision-making.

Sparse deep learning has become a popular technique for improving the performance of deep neural networks in areas such as uncertainty quantification, variable selection, and large-scale network compression. However, most existing research has focused on problems where the observations are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), and there has been little work on the problems where the observations are dependent, such as time series data and sequential data in natural language processing. This paper aims to address this gap by studying the theory for sparse deep learning with dependent data. We show that sparse recurrent neural networks (RNNs) can be consistently estimated, and their predictions are asymptotically normally distributed under appropriate assumptions, enabling the prediction uncertainty to be correctly quantified. Our numerical results show that sparse deep learning outperforms state-of-the-art methods, such as conformal predictions, in prediction uncertainty quantification for time series data. Furthermore, our results indicate that the proposed method can consistently identify the autoregressive order for time series data and outperform existing methods in large-scale model compression. Our proposed method has important practical implications in fields such as finance, healthcare, and energy, where both accurate point estimates and prediction uncertainty quantification are of concern.

Deep neural networks are vulnerable to adversarial noise. Adversarial training (AT) has been demonstrated to be the most effective defense strategy to protect neural networks from being fooled. However, we find AT omits to learning robust features, resulting in poor performance of adversarial robustness. To address this issue, we highlight two characteristics of robust representation: (1) $\bf{exclusion}$: the feature of natural examples keeps away from that of other classes; (2) $\bf{alignment}$: the feature of natural and corresponding adversarial examples is close to each other. These motivate us to propose a generic framework of AT to gain robust representation, by the asymmetric negative contrast and reverse attention. Specifically, we design an asymmetric negative contrast based on predicted probabilities, to push away examples of different classes in the feature space. Moreover, we propose to weight feature by parameters of the linear classifier as the reverse attention, to obtain class-aware feature and pull close the feature of the same class. Empirical evaluations on three benchmark datasets show our methods greatly advance the robustness of AT and achieve state-of-the-art performance. Code is available at .

The success of Transformer models has pushed the deep learning model scale to billions of parameters. Due to the limited memory resource of a single GPU, However, the best practice for choosing the optimal parallel strategy is still lacking, since it requires domain expertise in both deep learning and parallel computing. The Colossal-AI system addressed the above challenge by introducing a unified interface to scale your sequential code of model training to distributed environments. It supports parallel training methods such as data, pipeline, tensor, and sequence parallelism, as well as heterogeneous training methods integrated with zero redundancy optimizer. Compared to the baseline system, Colossal-AI can achieve up to 2.76 times training speedup on large-scale models.

We present a versatile adaptation of existing dimensionality reduction (DR) objectives, enabling the simultaneous reduction of both sample and feature sizes. Correspondances between input and embedding samples are computed through a semi-relaxed Gromov-Wasserstein optimal transport (OT) problem. When the embedding sample size matches that of the input, our model recovers classical popular DR models. When the embedding's dimensionality is unconstrained, we show that the OT plan delivers a competitive hard clustering. We emphasize the importance of intermediate stages that blend DR and clustering for summarizing real data and apply our method to visualize datasets of images.

Temporal Action Localization (TAL) aims to identify actions' start, end, and class labels in untrimmed videos. While recent advancements using transformer networks and Feature Pyramid Networks (FPN) have enhanced visual feature recognition in TAL tasks, less progress has been made in the integration of audio features into such frameworks. This paper introduces the Multi-Resolution Audio-Visual Feature Fusion (MRAV-FF), an innovative method to merge audio-visual data across different temporal resolutions. Central to our approach is a hierarchical gated cross-attention mechanism, which discerningly weighs the importance of audio information at diverse temporal scales. Such a technique not only refines the precision of regression boundaries but also bolsters classification confidence. Importantly, MRAV-FF is versatile, making it compatible with existing FPN TAL architectures and offering a significant enhancement in performance when audio data is available.

The theoretical landscape of federated learning (FL) undergoes rapid evolution, but its practical application encounters a series of intricate challenges, and hyperparameter optimization is one of these critical challenges. Amongst the diverse adjustments in hyperparameters, the adaptation of the learning rate emerges as a crucial component, holding the promise of significantly enhancing the efficacy of FL systems. In response to this critical need, this paper presents FedHyper, a novel hypergradient-based learning rate adaptation algorithm specifically designed for FL. FedHyper serves as a universal learning rate scheduler that can adapt both global and local rates as the training progresses. In addition, FedHyper not only showcases unparalleled robustness to a spectrum of initial learning rate configurations but also significantly alleviates the necessity for laborious empirical learning rate adjustments. We provide a comprehensive theoretical analysis of FedHyper's convergence rate and conduct extensive experiments on vision and language benchmark datasets. The results demonstrate that FEDHYPER consistently converges 1.1-3x faster than FedAvg and the competing baselines while achieving superior final accuracy. Moreover, FedHyper catalyzes a remarkable surge in accuracy, augmenting it by up to 15% compared to FedAvg under suboptimal initial learning rate settings.

The fundamental problem in toxicity detection task lies in the fact that the toxicity is ill-defined. This causes us to rely on subjective and vague data in models' training, which results in non-robust and non-accurate results: garbage in - garbage out. This work suggests a new, stress-level-based definition of toxicity designed to be objective and context-aware. On par with it, we also describe possible ways of applying this new definition to dataset creation and model training.

In this paper, we study how the granularity of pretraining labels affects the generalization of deep neural networks in image classification tasks. We focus on the "fine-to-coarse" transfer learning setting, where the pretraining label space is more fine-grained than that of the target problem. Empirically, we show that pretraining on the leaf labels of ImageNet21k produces better transfer results on ImageNet1k than pretraining on other coarser granularity levels, which supports the common practice used in the community. Theoretically, we explain the benefit of fine-grained pretraining by proving that, for a data distribution satisfying certain hierarchy conditions, 1) coarse-grained pretraining only allows a neural network to learn the "common" or "easy-to-learn" features well, while 2) fine-grained pretraining helps the network learn the "rarer" or "fine-grained" features in addition to the common ones, thus improving its accuracy on hard downstream test samples in which common features are missing or weak in strength. Furthermore, we perform comprehensive experiments using the label hierarchies of iNaturalist 2021 and observe that the following conditions, in addition to proper choice of label granularity, enable the transfer to work well in practice: 1) the pretraining dataset needs to have a meaningful label hierarchy, and 2) the pretraining and target label functions need to align well.

This paper studies generative flow networks (GFlowNets) to sample objects from the Boltzmann energy distribution via a sequence of actions. In particular, we focus on improving GFlowNet with partial inference: training flow functions with the evaluation of the intermediate states or transitions. To this end, the recently developed forward-looking GFlowNet reparameterizes the flow functions based on evaluating the energy of intermediate states. However, such an evaluation of intermediate energies may (i) be too expensive or impossible to evaluate and (ii) even provide misleading training signals under large energy fluctuations along the sequence of actions. To resolve this issue, we propose learning energy decompositions for GFlowNets (LED-GFN). Our main idea is to (i) decompose the energy of an object into learnable potential functions defined on state transitions and (ii) reparameterize the flow functions using the potential functions. In particular, to produce informative local credits, we propose to regularize the potential to change smoothly over the sequence of actions. It is also noteworthy that training GFlowNet with our learned potential can preserve the optimal policy. We empirically verify the superiority of LED-GFN in five problems including the generation of unstructured and maximum independent sets, molecular graphs, and RNA sequences.

We identify hidden layers inside a DNN with group actions on the data space, and formulate the DNN as a dual voice transform with respect to Koopman operator, a linear representation of the group action. Based on the group theoretic arguments, particularly by using Schur's lemma, we show a simple proof of the universality of those DNNs.

A maturing area of research in deep learning is the development of architectures that can learn explicit representations of relational features. In this paper, we focus on the problem of learning representations of hierarchical relations, proposing an architectural framework we call "relational convolutional networks". Given a sequence of objects, a "multi-dimensional inner product relation" module produces a relation tensor describing all pairwise relations. A "relational convolution" layer then transforms the relation tensor into a sequence of new objects, each describing the relations within some group of objects at the previous layer. Graphlet filters, analogous to filters in convolutional neural networks, represent a template of relations against which the relation tensor is compared at each grouping. Repeating this yields representations of higher-order, hierarchical relations. We present the motivation and details of the architecture, together with a set of experiments to demonstrate how relational convolutional networks can provide an effective framework for modeling relational tasks that have hierarchical structure.

We formalize and interpret the geometric structure of $d$-dimensional fully connected ReLU-layers in neural networks. The parameters of a ReLU-layer induce a natural partition of the input domain, such that in each sector of the partition, the ReLU-layer can be greatly simplified. This leads to a geometric interpretation of a ReLU-layer as a projection onto a polyhedral cone followed by an affine transformation, in line with the description in [doi:10.48550/arXiv.1905.08922] for convolutional networks with ReLU activations. Further, this structure facilitates simplified expressions for preimages of the intersection between partition sectors and hyperplanes, which is useful when describing decision boundaries in a classification setting. We investigate this in detail for a feed-forward network with one hidden ReLU-layer, where we provide results on the geometric complexity of the decision boundary generated by such networks, as well as proving that modulo an affine transformation, such a network can only generate $d$ different decision boundaries. Finally, the effect of adding more layers to the network is discussed.

Machine Learning (ML) techniques have found applications in estimating chemical kinetics properties. With the accumulated drug molecules identified through "AI4drug discovery", the next imperative lies in AI-driven design for high-throughput chemical synthesis processes, with the estimation of properties of unseen reactions with unexplored molecules. To this end, the existing ML approaches for kinetics property prediction are required to be Out-Of-Distribution (OOD) generalizable. In this paper, we categorize the OOD kinetic property prediction into three levels (structure, condition, and mechanism), revealing unique aspects of such problems. Under this framework, we create comprehensive datasets to benchmark (1) the state-of-the-art ML approaches for reaction prediction in the OOD setting and (2) the state-of-the-art graph OOD methods in kinetics property prediction problems. Our results demonstrated the challenges and opportunities in OOD kinetics property prediction. Our datasets and benchmarks can further support research in this direction.

Surrogate models play a crucial role in retrospectively interpreting complex and powerful black box machine learning models via model distillation. This paper focuses on using model-based trees as surrogate models which partition the feature space into interpretable regions via decision rules. Within each region, interpretable models based on additive main effects are used to approximate the behavior of the black box model, striking for an optimal balance between interpretability and performance. Four model-based tree algorithms, namely SLIM, GUIDE, MOB, and CTree, are compared regarding their ability to generate such surrogate models. We investigate fidelity, interpretability, stability, and the algorithms' capability to capture interaction effects through appropriate splits. Based on our comprehensive analyses, we finally provide an overview of user-specific recommendations.

Massive MIMO is expected to play an important role in the development of 5G networks. This paper addresses the issue of pilot contamination and scalability in massive MIMO systems. The current practice of reusing orthogonal pilot sequences in adjacent cells leads to difficulty in differentiating incoming inter- and intra-cell pilot sequences. One possible solution is to increase the number of orthogonal pilot sequences, which results in dedicating more space of coherence block to pilot transmission than data transmission. This, in turn, also hinders the scalability of massive MIMO systems, particularly in accommodating a large number of IoT devices within a cell. To overcome these challenges, this paper devises an innovative pilot allocation scheme based on the data transfer patterns of IoT devices. The scheme assigns orthogonal pilot sequences to clusters of devices instead of individual devices, allowing multiple devices to utilize the same pilot for periodically transmitting data. Moreover, we formulate the pilot assignment problem as a graph coloring problem and use the max k-cut graph partitioning approach to overcome the pilot contamination in a multicell massive MIMO system. The proposed scheme significantly improves the spectral efficiency and enables the scalability of massive MIMO systems; for instance, by using ten orthogonal pilot sequences, we are able to accommodate 200 devices with only a 12.5% omission rate.

This paper proposes a latent prompt Transformer model for solving challenging optimization problems such as molecule design, where the goal is to find molecules with optimal values of a target chemical or biological property that can be computed by an existing software. Our proposed model consists of three components. (1) A latent vector whose prior distribution is modeled by a Unet transformation of a Gaussian white noise vector. (2) A molecule generation model that generates the string-based representation of molecule conditional on the latent vector in (1). We adopt the causal Transformer model that takes the latent vector in (1) as prompt. (3) A property prediction model that predicts the value of the target property of a molecule based on a non-linear regression on the latent vector in (1). We call the proposed model the latent prompt Transformer model. After initial training of the model on existing molecules and their property values, we then gradually shift the model distribution towards the region that supports desired values of the target property for the purpose of molecule design. Our experiments show that our proposed model achieves state of the art performances on several benchmark molecule design tasks.

Energy justice is a growing area of interest in interdisciplinary energy research. However, identifying systematic biases in the energy sector remains challenging due to confounding variables, intricate heterogeneity in treatment effects, and limited data availability. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel approach for counterfactual causal analysis centered on energy justice. We use subgroup analysis to manage diverse factors and leverage the idea of transfer learning to mitigate data scarcity in each subgroup. In our numerical analysis, we apply our method to a large-scale customer-level power outage data set and investigate the counterfactual effect of demographic factors, such as income and age of the population, on power outage durations. Our results indicate that low-income and elderly-populated areas consistently experience longer power outages, regardless of weather conditions. This points to existing biases in the power system and highlights the need for focused improvements in areas with economic challenges.

Machine-learning phishing webpage detectors (ML-PWD) have been shown to suffer from adversarial manipulations of the HTML code of the input webpage. Nevertheless, the attacks recently proposed have demonstrated limited effectiveness due to their lack of optimizing the usage of the adopted manipulations, and they focus solely on specific elements of the HTML code. In this work, we overcome these limitations by first designing a novel set of fine-grained manipulations which allow to modify the HTML code of the input phishing webpage without compromising its maliciousness and visual appearance, i.e., the manipulations are functionality- and rendering-preserving by design. We then select which manipulations should be applied to bypass the target detector by a query-efficient black-box optimization algorithm. Our experiments show that our attacks are able to raze to the ground the performance of current state-of-the-art ML-PWD using just 30 queries, thus overcoming the weaker attacks developed in previous work, and enabling a much fairer robustness evaluation of ML-PWD.

History matching based on monitoring data will enable uncertainty reduction, and thus improved aquifer management, in industrial-scale carbon storage operations. In traditional model-based data assimilation, geomodel parameters are modified to force agreement between flow simulation results and observations. In data-space inversion (DSI), history-matched quantities of interest, e.g., posterior pressure and saturation fields conditioned to observations, are inferred directly, without constructing posterior geomodels. This is accomplished efficiently using a set of O(1000) prior simulation results, data parameterization, and posterior sampling within a Bayesian setting. In this study, we develop and implement (in DSI) a deep-learning-based parameterization to represent spatio-temporal pressure and CO2 saturation fields at a set of time steps. The new parameterization uses an adversarial autoencoder (AAE) for dimension reduction and a convolutional long short-term memory (convLSTM) network to represent the spatial distribution and temporal evolution of the pressure and saturation fields. This parameterization is used with an ensemble smoother with multiple data assimilation (ESMDA) in the DSI framework to enable posterior predictions. A realistic 3D system characterized by prior geological realizations drawn from a range of geological scenarios is considered. A local grid refinement procedure is introduced to estimate the error covariance term that appears in the history matching formulation. Extensive history matching results are presented for various quantities, for multiple synthetic true models. Substantial uncertainty reduction in posterior pressure and saturation fields is achieved in all cases. The framework is applied to efficiently provide posterior predictions for a range of error covariance specifications. Such an assessment would be expensive using a model-based approach.

We propose a graphical structure for structural equation models that is stable under marginalization under linearity and Gaussianity assumptions. We show that computing the maximum likelihood estimation of this model is equivalent to training a neural network. We implement a GPU-based algorithm that computes the maximum likelihood estimation of these models.

Knowledge distillation constitutes a potent methodology for condensing substantial neural networks into more compact and efficient counterparts. Within this context, softmax regression representation learning serves as a widely embraced approach, leveraging a pre-established teacher network to guide the learning process of a diminutive student network. Notably, despite the extensive inquiry into the efficacy of softmax regression representation learning, the intricate underpinnings governing the knowledge transfer mechanism remain inadequately elucidated. This study introduces the 'Ideal Joint Classifier Knowledge Distillation' (IJCKD) framework, an overarching paradigm that not only furnishes a lucid and exhaustive comprehension of prevailing knowledge distillation techniques but also establishes a theoretical underpinning for prospective investigations. Employing mathematical methodologies derived from domain adaptation theory, this investigation conducts a comprehensive examination of the error boundary of the student network contingent upon the teacher network. Consequently, our framework facilitates efficient knowledge transference between teacher and student networks, thereby accommodating a diverse spectrum of applications.

Real-time intelligent detection and prediction of subjects' behavior particularly their movements or actions is critical in the ward. This approach offers the advantage of reducing in-hospital care costs and improving the efficiency of healthcare workers, which is especially true for scenarios at night or during peak admission periods. Therefore, in this work, we propose using computer vision (CV) and deep learning (DL) methods for detecting subjects and recognizing their actions. We utilize OpenPose as an accurate subject detector for recognizing the positions of human subjects in the video stream. Additionally, we employ AlphAction's Asynchronous Interaction Aggregation (AIA) network to predict the actions of detected subjects. This integrated model, referred to as PoseAction, is proposed. At the same time, the proposed model is further trained to predict 12 common actions in ward areas, such as staggering, chest pain, and falling down, using medical-related video clips from the NTU RGB+D and NTU RGB+D 120 datasets. The results demonstrate that PoseAction achieves the highest classification mAP of 98.72% (IoU@0.5). Additionally, this study develops an online real-time mode for action recognition, which strongly supports the clinical translation of PoseAction. Furthermore, using OpenPose's function for recognizing face key points, we also implement face blurring, which is a practical solution to address the privacy protection concerns of patients and healthcare workers. Nevertheless, the training data for PoseAction is currently limited, particularly in terms of label diversity. Consequently, the subsequent step involves utilizing a more diverse dataset (including general actions) to train the model's parameters for improved generalization.

Transformers have demonstrated their success in various domains and tasks. However, Transformers struggle with long input sequences due to their limited capacity. While one solution is to increase input length, endlessly stretching the length is unrealistic. Furthermore, humans selectively remember and use only relevant information from inputs, unlike Transformers which process all raw data from start to end. We introduce Memoria, a general memory network that applies Hebbian theory which is a major theory explaining human memory formulation to enhance long-term dependencies in neural networks. Memoria stores and retrieves information called engram at multiple memory levels of working memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory, using connection weights that change according to Hebb's rule. Through experiments with popular Transformer-based models like BERT and GPT, we present that Memoria significantly improves the ability to consider long-term dependencies in various tasks. Results show that Memoria outperformed existing methodologies in sorting and language modeling, and long text classification.

Unsupervised pre-training is a common step in developing computer vision models and large language models. In this setting, the absence of labels requires the use of similarity-based loss functions, such as contrastive loss, that favor minimizing the distance between similar inputs and maximizing the distance between distinct inputs. As privacy concerns mount, training these models using differential privacy has become more important. However, due to how inputs are generated for these losses, one of their undesirable properties is that their $L_2$ sensitivity can grow with increasing batch size. This property is particularly disadvantageous for differentially private training methods, such as DP-SGD. To overcome this issue, we develop a new DP-SGD variant for similarity based loss functions -- in particular the commonly used contrastive loss -- that manipulates gradients of the objective function in a novel way to obtain a senstivity of the summed gradient that is $O(1)$ for batch size $n$. We test our DP-SGD variant on some preliminary CIFAR-10 pre-training and CIFAR-100 finetuning tasks and show that, in both tasks, our method's performance comes close to that of a non-private model and generally outperforms DP-SGD applied directly to the contrastive loss.

With the introduction of ChatGPT, OpenAI made large language models (LLM) accessible to users with limited IT expertise. However, users with no background in natural language processing (NLP) might lack a proper understanding of LLMs. Thus the awareness of their inherent limitations, and therefore will take the systems' output at face value. In this paper, we systematically analyse prompts and the generated responses to identify possible problematic issues with a special focus on gender biases, which users need to be aware of when processing the system's output. We explore how ChatGPT reacts in English and German if prompted to answer from a female, male, or neutral perspective. In an in-depth investigation, we examine selected prompts and analyse to what extent responses differ if the system is prompted several times in an identical way. On this basis, we show that ChatGPT is indeed useful for helping non-IT users draft texts for their daily work. However, it is absolutely crucial to thoroughly check the system's responses for biases as well as for syntactic and grammatical mistakes.

Characterizing the relationship between neural population activity and behavioral data is a central goal of neuroscience. While latent variable models (LVMs) are successful in describing high-dimensional time-series data, they are typically only designed for a single type of data, making it difficult to identify structure shared across different experimental data modalities. Here, we address this shortcoming by proposing an unsupervised LVM which extracts temporally evolving shared and independent latents for distinct, simultaneously recorded experimental modalities. We do this by combining Gaussian Process Factor Analysis (GPFA), an interpretable LVM for neural spiking data with temporally smooth latent space, with Gaussian Process Variational Autoencoders (GP-VAEs), which similarly use a GP prior to characterize correlations in a latent space, but admit rich expressivity due to a deep neural network mapping to observations. We achieve interpretability in our model by partitioning latent variability into components that are either shared between or independent to each modality. We parameterize the latents of our model in the Fourier domain, and show improved latent identification using this approach over standard GP-VAE methods. We validate our model on simulated multi-modal data consisting of Poisson spike counts and MNIST images that scale and rotate smoothly over time. We show that the multi-modal GP-VAE (MM-GPVAE) is able to not only identify the shared and independent latent structure across modalities accurately, but provides good reconstructions of both images and neural rates on held-out trials. Finally, we demonstrate our framework on two real world multi-modal experimental settings: Drosophila whole-brain calcium imaging alongside tracked limb positions, and Manduca sexta spike train measurements from ten wing muscles as the animal tracks a visual stimulus.

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have produced state-of-the-art results for image classification tasks. However, they are limited in their ability to handle rotational and viewpoint variations due to information loss in max-pooling layers. Capsule Networks (CapsNets) employ a computationally-expensive iterative process referred to as dynamic routing to address these issues. CapsNets, however, often fall short on complex datasets and require more computational resources than CNNs. To overcome these challenges, we introduce the Parallel Dynamic Routing CapsNet (PDR-CapsNet), a deeper and more energy-efficient alternative to CapsNet that offers superior performance, less energy consumption, and lower overfitting rates. By leveraging a parallelization strategy, PDR-CapsNet mitigates the computational complexity of CapsNet and increases throughput, efficiently using hardware resources. As a result, we achieve 83.55\% accuracy while requiring 87.26\% fewer parameters, 32.27\% and 47.40\% fewer MACs, and Flops, achieving 3x faster inference and 7.29J less energy consumption on a 2080Ti GPU with 11GB VRAM compared to CapsNet and for the CIFAR-10 dataset.

This paper addresses the distributed online control problem over a network of linear time-invariant (LTI) systems (with possibly unknown dynamics) in the presence of adversarial perturbations. There exists a global network cost that is characterized by a time-varying convex function, which evolves in an adversarial manner and is sequentially and partially observed by local agents. The goal of each agent is to generate a control sequence that can compete with the best centralized control policy in hindsight, which has access to the global cost. This problem is formulated as a regret minimization. For the case of known dynamics, we propose a fully distributed disturbance feedback controller that guarantees a regret bound of $O(\sqrt{T}\log T)$, where $T$ is the time horizon. For the unknown dynamics case, we design a distributed explore-then-commit approach, where in the exploration phase all agents jointly learn the system dynamics, and in the learning phase our proposed control algorithm is applied using each agent system estimate. We establish a regret bound of $O(T^{2/3} \text{poly}(\log T))$ for this setting.

Recent experiments have shown that, often, when training a neural network with gradient descent (GD) with a step size $\eta$, the operator norm of the Hessian of the loss grows until it approximately reaches $2/\eta$, after which it fluctuates around this value. The quantity $2/\eta$ has been called the "edge of stability" based on consideration of a local quadratic approximation of the loss. We perform a similar calculation to arrive at an "edge of stability" for Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a variant of GD which has been shown to improve its generalization. Unlike the case for GD, the resulting SAM-edge depends on the norm of the gradient. Using three deep learning training tasks, we see empirically that SAM operates on the edge of stability identified by this analysis.

Molecular property prediction is a critical task in computational drug discovery. While recent advances in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformers have shown to be effective and promising, they face the following limitations: Transformer self-attention does not explicitly consider the underlying molecule structure while GNN feature representation alone is not sufficient to capture granular and hidden interactions and characteristics that distinguish similar molecules. To address these limitations, we propose SYN- FUSION, a novel approach that synergistically combines pre-trained features from GNNs and Transformers. This approach provides a comprehensive molecular representation, capturing both the global molecule structure and the individual atom characteristics. Experimental results on MoleculeNet benchmarks demonstrate superior performance, surpassing previous models in 5 out of 7 classification datasets and 4 out of 6 regression datasets. The performance of SYN-FUSION has been compared with other Graph-Transformer models that have been jointly trained using a combination of transformer and graph features, and it is found that our approach is on par with those models in terms of performance. Extensive analysis of the learned fusion model across aspects such as loss, latent space, and weight distribution further validates the effectiveness of SYN-FUSION. Finally, an ablation study unequivocally demonstrates that the synergy achieved by SYN-FUSION surpasses the performance of its individual model components and their ensemble, offering a substantial improvement in predicting molecular properties.

Pretrained language models (LMs) encode implicit representations of knowledge in their parameters. However, localizing these representations and disentangling them from each other remains an open problem. In this work, we investigate whether pretrained language models contain various knowledge-critical subnetworks: particular sparse computational subgraphs responsible for encoding specific knowledge the model has memorized. We propose a multi-objective differentiable weight masking scheme to discover these subnetworks and show that we can use them to precisely remove specific knowledge from models while minimizing adverse effects on the behavior of the original language model. We demonstrate our method on multiple GPT2 variants, uncovering highly sparse subnetworks (98%+) that are solely responsible for specific collections of relational knowledge. When these subnetworks are removed, the remaining network maintains most of its initial capacity (modeling language and other memorized relational knowledge) but struggles to express the removed knowledge, and suffers performance drops on examples needing this removed knowledge on downstream tasks after finetuning.

Accurate quantification of model uncertainty has long been recognized as a fundamental requirement for trusted AI. In regression tasks, uncertainty is typically quantified using prediction intervals calibrated to an ad-hoc operating point, making evaluation and comparison across different studies relatively difficult. Our work leverages: (1) the concept of operating characteristics curves and (2) the notion of a gain over a null reference, to derive a novel operating point agnostic assessment methodology for prediction intervals. The paper defines the Uncertainty Characteristics Curve and demonstrates its utility in selected scenarios. We argue that the proposed method addresses the current need for comprehensive assessment of prediction intervals and thus represents a valuable addition to the uncertainty quantification toolbox.

State estimation is the cornerstone of the power system control center since it provides the operating condition of the system in consecutive time intervals. This work investigates the application of physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) for accelerating power systems state estimation in monitoring the operation of power systems. Traditional state estimation techniques often rely on iterative algorithms that can be computationally intensive, particularly for large-scale power systems. In this paper, a novel approach that leverages the inherent physical knowledge of power systems through the integration of PINNs is proposed. By incorporating physical laws as prior knowledge, the proposed method significantly reduces the computational complexity associated with state estimation while maintaining high accuracy. The proposed method achieves up to 11% increase in accuracy, 75% reduction in standard deviation of results, and 30% faster convergence, as demonstrated by comprehensive experiments on the IEEE 14-bus system.

Patching gigapixel whole slide images (WSIs) is an important task in computational pathology. Some methods have been proposed to select a subset of patches as WSI representation for downstream tasks. While most of the computational pathology tasks are designed to classify or detect the presence of pathological lesions in each WSI, the confounding role and redundant nature of normal histology in tissue samples are generally overlooked in WSI representations. In this paper, we propose and validate the concept of an "atlas of normal tissue" solely using samples of WSIs obtained from normal tissue biopsies. Such atlases can be employed to eliminate normal fragments of tissue samples and hence increase the representativeness collection of patches. We tested our proposed method by establishing a normal atlas using 107 normal skin WSIs and demonstrated how established indexes and search engines like Yottixel can be improved. We used 553 WSIs of cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cSCC) to show the advantage. We also validated our method applied to an external dataset of 451 breast WSIs. The number of selected WSI patches was reduced by 30% to 50% after utilizing the proposed normal atlas while maintaining the same indexing and search performance in leave-one-patinet-out validation for both datasets. We show that the proposed normal atlas shows promise for unsupervised selection of the most representative patches of the abnormal/malignant WSI lesions.

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have exhibited remarkable performance in a variety of tasks, but this strong performance often comes with the high expense of using paid API services. In this paper, we are motivated to study building an LLM cascade to save the cost of using LLMs, particularly for performing reasoning (e.g., mathematical, causal) tasks. Our cascade pipeline follows the intuition that simpler questions can be addressed by a weaker but more affordable LLM, whereas only the challenging questions necessitate the stronger and more expensive LLM. To realize this decision-making, we consider the "answer consistency" of the weaker LLM as a signal of the question difficulty and propose several methods for the answer sampling and consistency checking, including one leveraging a mixture of two thought representations (i.e., Chain-of-Thought and Program-of-Thought). Through experiments on six reasoning benchmark datasets, with GPT-3.5-turbo and GPT-4 being the weaker and stronger LLMs, respectively, we demonstrate that our proposed LLM cascades can achieve performance comparable to using solely the stronger LLM but require only 40% of its cost.

Optical neural architectures (ONAs) use coding elements with optimized physical parameters to perform intelligent measurements. However, fabricating ONAs while maintaining design performances is challenging. Limitations in fabrication techniques often limit the realizable precision of the trained parameters. Physical constraints may also limit the range of values the physical parameters can hold. Thus, ONAs should be trained within the implementable constraints. However, such physics-based constraints reduce the training objective to a constrained optimization problem, making it harder to optimize with existing gradient-based methods. To alleviate these critical issues that degrade performance from simulation to realization we propose a physics-informed quantization-aware training framework. Our approach accounts for the physical constraints during the training process, leading to robust designs. We evaluate our approach on an ONA proposed in the literature, named a diffractive deep neural network (D2NN), for all-optical phase imaging and for classification of phase objects. With extensive experiments on different quantization levels and datasets, we show that our approach leads to ONA designs that are robust to quantization noise.

In this study, we explore the applications of random matrix theory (RMT) in the training of deep neural networks (DNNs), focusing on layer pruning to simplify DNN architecture and loss landscape. RMT, recently used to address overfitting in deep learning, enables the examination of DNN's weight layer spectra. We use these techniques to optimally determine the number of singular values to be removed from the weight layers of a DNN during training via singular value decomposition (SVD). This process aids in DNN simplification and accuracy enhancement, as evidenced by training simple DNN models on the MNIST and Fashion MNIST datasets. Our method can be applied to any fully connected or convolutional layer of a pretrained DNN, decreasing the layer's parameters and simplifying the DNN architecture while preserving or even enhancing the model's accuracy. By discarding small singular values based on RMT criteria, the accuracy of the test set remains consistent, facilitating more efficient DNN training without compromising performance. We provide both theoretical and empirical evidence supporting our claim that the elimination of small singular values based on RMT does not negatively impact the DNN's accuracy. Our results offer valuable insights into the practical application of RMT for the creation of more efficient and accurate deep-learning models.

The Cadenza project aims to enhance the audio quality of music for individuals with hearing loss. As part of this, the project is organizing the ICASSP SP Cadenza Challenge: Music Demixing/Remixing for Hearing Aids. The challenge can be tackled by decomposing the music at the hearing aid microphones into vocals, bass, drums, and other components. These can then be intelligently remixed in a personalized manner to improve audio quality. Alternatively, an end-to-end approach could be used. Processes need to consider the music itself, the gain applied to each component, and the listener's hearing loss. The submitted entries will be evaluated using the intrusive objective metric, the Hearing Aid Audio Quality Index (HAAQI). This paper outlines the challenge.

Safe exploration is essential for the practical use of reinforcement learning (RL) in many real-world scenarios. In this paper, we present a generalized safe exploration (GSE) problem as a unified formulation of common safe exploration problems. We then propose a solution of the GSE problem in the form of a meta-algorithm for safe exploration, MASE, which combines an unconstrained RL algorithm with an uncertainty quantifier to guarantee safety in the current episode while properly penalizing unsafe explorations before actual safety violation to discourage them in future episodes. The advantage of MASE is that we can optimize a policy while guaranteeing with a high probability that no safety constraint will be violated under proper assumptions. Specifically, we present two variants of MASE with different constructions of the uncertainty quantifier: one based on generalized linear models with theoretical guarantees of safety and near-optimality, and another that combines a Gaussian process to ensure safety with a deep RL algorithm to maximize the reward. Finally, we demonstrate that our proposed algorithm achieves better performance than state-of-the-art algorithms on grid-world and Safety Gym benchmarks without violating any safety constraints, even during training.

We seek to automate the generation of drug-like compounds conditioned to specific protein pocket targets. Most current methods approximate the protein-molecule distribution of a finite dataset and, therefore struggle to generate molecules with significant binding improvement over the training dataset. We instead frame the pocket-conditioned molecular generation task as an RL problem and develop TacoGFN, a target conditional Generative Flow Network model. Our method is explicitly encouraged to generate molecules with desired properties as opposed to fitting on a pre-existing data distribution. To this end, we develop transformer-based docking score prediction to speed up docking score computation and propose TacoGFN to explore molecule space efficiently. Furthermore, we incorporate several rounds of active learning where generated samples are queried using a docking oracle to improve the docking score prediction. This approach allows us to accurately explore as much of the molecule landscape as we can afford computationally. Empirically, molecules generated using TacoGFN and its variants significantly outperform all baseline methods across every property (Docking score, QED, SA, Lipinski), while being orders of magnitude faster.

Over the past decade, machine learning has demonstrated impressive results, often surpassing human capabilities in sensing tasks relevant to autonomous flight. Unlike traditional aerospace software, the parameters of machine learning models are not hand-coded nor derived from physics but learned from data. They are automatically adjusted during a training phase, and their values do not usually correspond to physical requirements. As a result, requirements cannot be directly traced to lines of code, hindering the current bottom-up aerospace certification paradigm. This paper attempts to address this gap by 1) demystifying the inner workings and processes to build machine learning models, 2) formally establishing theoretical guarantees given by those processes, and 3) complementing these formal elements with practical considerations to develop a complete certification argument for safety-critical machine learning systems. Based on a scalable statistical verifier, our proposed framework is model-agnostic and tool-independent, making it adaptable to many use cases in the industry. We demonstrate results on a widespread application in autonomous flight: vision-based landing.

Property prediction on molecular graphs is an important application of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Recently, unlabeled molecular data has become abundant, which facilitates the rapid development of self-supervised learning for GNNs in the chemical domain. In this work, we propose pretraining GNNs at the fragment level, which serves as a promising middle ground to overcome the limitations of node-level and graph-level pretraining. Borrowing techniques from recent work on principle subgraph mining, we obtain a compact vocabulary of prevalent fragments that span a large pretraining dataset. From the extracted vocabulary, we introduce several fragment-based contrastive and predictive pretraining tasks. The contrastive learning task jointly pretrains two different GNNs: one based on molecular graphs and one based on fragment graphs, which represents high-order connectivity within molecules. By enforcing the consistency between the fragment embedding and the aggregated embedding of the corresponding atoms from the molecular graphs, we ensure that both embeddings capture structural information at multiple resolutions. The structural information of the fragment graphs is further exploited to extract auxiliary labels for the graph-level predictive pretraining. We employ both the pretrained molecular-based and fragment-based GNNs for downstream prediction, thus utilizing the fragment information during finetuning. Our models advance the performances on 5 out of 8 common molecular benchmarks and improve the performances on long-range biological benchmarks by at least 11.5%.

The symmetry and geometry of input data are considered to be encoded in the internal data representation inside the neural network, but the specific encoding rule has been less investigated. By focusing on a joint group invariant function on the data-parameter domain, we present a systematic rule to find a dual group action on the parameter domain from a group action on the data domain. Further, we introduce generalized neural networks induced from the joint invariant functions, and present a new group theoretic proof of their universality theorems by using Schur's lemma. Since traditional universality theorems were demonstrated based on functional analytical methods, this study sheds light on the group theoretic aspect of the approximation theory, connecting geometric deep learning to abstract harmonic analysis.

With the emergence of Transformer architectures and their powerful understanding of textual data, a new horizon has opened up to predict the molecular properties based on text description. While SMILES are the most common form of representation, they are lacking robustness, rich information and canonicity, which limit their effectiveness in becoming generalizable representations. Here, we present GPT-MolBERTa, a self-supervised large language model (LLM) which uses detailed textual descriptions of molecules to predict their properties. A text based description of 326000 molecules were collected using ChatGPT and used to train LLM to learn the representation of molecules. To predict the properties for the downstream tasks, both BERT and RoBERTa models were used in the finetuning stage. Experiments show that GPT-MolBERTa performs well on various molecule property benchmarks, and approaching state of the art performance in regression tasks. Additionally, further analysis of the attention mechanisms show that GPT-MolBERTa is able to pick up important information from the input textual data, displaying the interpretability of the model.

Interactive search can provide a better experience by incorporating interaction feedback from the users. This can significantly improve search accuracy as it helps avoid irrelevant information and captures the users' search intents. Existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) systems use reinforcement learning (RL) models to incorporate the interactions but focus on item-level feedback, ignoring the fine-grained information found in sentence-level feedback. Yet such feedback requires extensive RL action space exploration and large amounts of annotated data. This work addresses these challenges by proposing a new deep Q-learning (DQ) approach, DQrank. DQrank adapts BERT-based models, the SOTA in natural language processing, to select crucial sentences based on users' engagement and rank the items to obtain more satisfactory responses. We also propose two mechanisms to better explore optimal actions. DQrank further utilizes the experience replay mechanism in DQ to store the feedback sentences to obtain a better initial ranking performance. We validate the effectiveness of DQrank on three search datasets. The results show that DQRank performs at least 12% better than the previous SOTA RL approaches. We also conduct detailed ablation studies. The ablation results demonstrate that each model component can efficiently extract and accumulate long-term engagement effects from the users' sentence-level feedback. This structure offers new technologies with promised performance to construct a search system with sentence-level interaction.

Chemical mixtures, satisfying multi-objective performance metrics and constraints, enable their use in chemical processes and electrochemical devices. In this work, we develop a differentiable chemical-physics framework for modeling chemical mixtures, DiffMix, where geometric deep learning (GDL) is leveraged to map from molecular species, compositions and environment conditions, to physical coefficients in the mixture physics laws. In particular, we extend mixture thermodynamic and transport laws by creating learnable physical coefficients, where we use graph neural networks as the molecule encoder and enforce component-wise permutation-invariance. We start our model evaluations with thermodynamics of binary mixtures, and further benchmarked multicomponent electrolyte mixtures on their transport properties, in order to test the model generalizability. We show improved prediction accuracy and model robustness of DiffMix than its purely data-driven variants. Furthermore, we demonstrate the efficient optimization of electrolyte transport properties, built on the gradient obtained using DiffMix auto-differentiation. Our simulation runs are then backed up by the data generated by a robotic experimentation setup, Clio. By combining mixture physics and GDL, DiffMix expands the predictive modeling methods for chemical mixtures and provides low-cost optimization approaches in large chemical spaces.

A modified LAB algorithm is introduced in this paper. It builds upon the original LAB algorithm (Reddy et al. 2023), which is a socio-inspired algorithm that models competitive and learning behaviours within a group, establishing hierarchical roles. The proposed algorithm incorporates the roulette wheel approach and a reduction factor introducing inter-group competition and iteratively narrowing down the sample space. The algorithm is validated by solving the benchmark test problems from CEC 2005 and CEC 2017. The solutions are validated using standard statistical tests such as two-sided and pairwise signed rank Wilcoxon test and Friedman rank test. The algorithm exhibited improved and superior robustness as well as search space exploration capabilities. Furthermore, a Clustering-Based Search Space Reduction (C-SSR) method is proposed, making the algorithm capable to solve constrained problems. The C-SSR method enables the algorithm to identify clusters of feasible regions, satisfying the constraints and contributing to achieve the optimal solution. This method demonstrates its effectiveness as a potential alternative to traditional constraint handling techniques. The results obtained using the Modified LAB algorithm are then compared with those achieved by other recent metaheuristic algorithms.

Frequent modifications of unit test cases are inevitable due to software's continuous underlying changes in source code, design, and requirements. Since manually maintaining software test suites is tedious, timely, and costly, automating the process of generation and maintenance of test units will significantly impact the effectiveness and efficiency of software testing processes. To this end, we propose an automated approach which exploits both structural and semantic properties of source code methods and test cases to recommend the most relevant and useful unit tests to the developers. The proposed approach initially trains a neural network to transform method-level source code, as well as unit tests, into distributed representations (embedded vectors) while preserving the importance of the structure in the code. Retrieving the semantic and structural properties of a given method, the approach computes cosine similarity between the method's embedding and the previously-embedded training instances. Further, according to the similarity scores between the embedding vectors, the model identifies the closest methods of embedding and the associated unit tests as the most similar recommendations. The results on the Methods2Test dataset showed that, while there is no guarantee to have similar relevant test cases for the group of similar methods, the proposed approach extracts the most similar existing test cases for a given method in the dataset, and evaluations show that recommended test cases decrease the developers' effort to generating expected test cases.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) have emerged as a powerful framework for representing and integrating complex biomedical information. However, assembling KGs from diverse sources remains a significant challenge in several aspects, including entity alignment, scalability, and the need for continuous updates to keep pace with scientific advancements. Moreover, the representative power of KGs is often limited by the scarcity of multi-modal data integration. To overcome these challenges, we propose Know2BIO, a general-purpose heterogeneous KG benchmark for the biomedical domain. Know2BIO integrates data from 30 diverse sources, capturing intricate relationships across 11 biomedical categories. It currently consists of ~219,000 nodes and ~6,200,000 edges. Know2BIO is capable of user-directed automated updating to reflect the latest knowledge in biomedical science. Furthermore, Know2BIO is accompanied by multi-modal data: node features including text descriptions, protein and compound sequences and structures, enabling the utilization of emerging natural language processing methods and multi-modal data integration strategies. We evaluate KG representation models on Know2BIO, demonstrating its effectiveness as a benchmark for KG representation learning in the biomedical field. Data and source code of Know2BIO are available at https://github.com/Yijia-Xiao/Know2BIO/.

The popularity of pre-trained large models has revolutionized downstream tasks across diverse fields, such as language, vision, and multi-modality. To minimize the adaption cost for downstream tasks, many Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) techniques are proposed for language and 2D image pre-trained models. However, the specialized PEFT method for 3D pre-trained models is still under-explored. To this end, we introduce Point-PEFT, a novel framework for adapting point cloud pre-trained models with minimal learnable parameters. Specifically, for a pre-trained 3D model, we freeze most of its parameters, and only tune the newly added PEFT modules on downstream tasks, which consist of a Point-prior Prompt and a Geometry-aware Adapter. The Point-prior Prompt adopts a set of learnable prompt tokens, for which we propose to construct a memory bank with domain-specific knowledge, and utilize a parameter-free attention to enhance the prompt tokens. The Geometry-aware Adapter aims to aggregate point cloud features within spatial neighborhoods to capture fine-grained geometric information through local interactions. Extensive experiments indicate that our Point-PEFT can achieve better performance than the full fine-tuning on various downstream tasks, while using only 5% of the trainable parameters, demonstrating the efficiency and effectiveness of our approach. Code will be released at https://github.com/EvenJoker/Point-PEFT.

We consider the problem of denoising with the help of prior information taken from a database of clean signals or images. Denoising with variational methods is very efficient if a regularizer well adapted to the nature of the data is available. Thanks to the maximum a posteriori Bayesian framework, such regularizer can be systematically linked with the distribution of the data. With deep neural networks (DNN), complex distributions can be recovered from a large training database.To reduce the computational burden of this task, we adapt the compressive learning framework to the learning of regularizers parametrized by DNN. We propose two variants of stochastic gradient descent (SGD) for the recovery of deep regularization parameters from a heavily compressed database. These algorithms outperform the initially proposed method that was limited to low-dimensional signals, each iteration using information from the whole database. They also benefit from classical SGD convergence guarantees. Thanks to these improvements we show that this method can be applied for patch based image denoising.}

IoT (Internet of Things) refers to the network of interconnected physical devices, vehicles, home appliances, and other items embedded with sensors, software, and connectivity, enabling them to collect and exchange data. IoT Forensics is collecting and analyzing digital evidence from IoT devices to investigate cybercrimes, security breaches, and other malicious activities that may have taken place on these connected devices. In particular, EM-SCA has become an essential tool for IoT forensics due to its ability to reveal confidential information about the internal workings of IoT devices without interfering these devices or wiretapping their networks. However, the accuracy and reliability of EM-SCA results can be limited by device variability, environmental factors, and data collection and processing methods. Besides, there is very few research on these limitations that affects significantly the accuracy of EM-SCA approaches for the crossed-IoT device portability as well as limited research on the possible solutions to address such challenge. Therefore, this empirical study examines the impact of device variability on the accuracy and reliability of EM-SCA approaches, in particular machine-learning (ML) based approaches for EM-SCA. We firstly presents the background, basic concepts and techniques used to evaluate the limitations of current EM-SCA approaches and datasets. Our study then addresses one of the most important limitation, which is caused by the multi-core architecture of the processors (SoC). We present an approach to collect the EM-SCA datasets and demonstrate the feasibility of using transfer learning to obtain more meaningful and reliable results from EM-SCA in IoT forensics of crossed-IoT devices. Our study moreover contributes a new dataset for using deep learning models in analysing Electromagnetic Side-Channel data with regards to the cross-device portability matter.

We aim to improve the Inverted Neural Radiance Fields (iNeRF) algorithm which defines the image pose estimation problem as a NeRF based iterative linear optimization. NeRFs are novel neural space representation models that can synthesize photorealistic novel views of real-world scenes or objects. Our contributions are as follows: we extend the localization optimization objective with a depth-based loss function, we introduce a multi-image based loss function where a sequence of images with known relative poses are used without increasing the computational complexity, we omit hierarchical sampling during volumetric rendering, meaning only the coarse model is used for pose estimation, and we how that by extending the sampling interval convergence can be achieved even or higher initial pose estimate errors. With the proposed modifications the convergence speed is significantly improved, and the basin of convergence is substantially extended.

Visual planning simulates how humans make decisions to achieve desired goals in the form of searching for visual causal transitions between an initial visual state and a final visual goal state. It has become increasingly important in egocentric vision with its advantages in guiding agents to perform daily tasks in complex environments. In this paper, we propose an interpretable and generalizable visual planning framework consisting of i) a novel Substitution-based Concept Learner (SCL) that abstracts visual inputs into disentangled concept representations, ii) symbol abstraction and reasoning that performs task planning via the self-learned symbols, and iii) a Visual Causal Transition model (ViCT) that grounds visual causal transitions to semantically similar real-world actions. Given an initial state, we perform goal-conditioned visual planning with a symbolic reasoning method fueled by the learned representations and causal transitions to reach the goal state. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed model, we collect a large-scale visual planning dataset based on AI2-THOR, dubbed as CCTP. Extensive experiments on this challenging dataset demonstrate the superior performance of our method in visual task planning. Empirically, we show that our framework can generalize to unseen task trajectories and unseen object categories.

In this paper, a unified framework for exploration in reinforcement learning (RL) is proposed based on an option-critic model. The proposed framework learns to integrate a set of diverse exploration strategies so that the agent can adaptively select the most effective exploration strategy over time to realize a relevant exploration-exploitation trade-off for each given task. The effectiveness of the proposed exploration framework is demonstrated by various experiments in the MiniGrid and Atari environments.

We propose conditional flows of the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) with the negative distance kernel for posterior sampling and conditional generative modeling. This MMD, which is also known as energy distance, has several advantageous properties like efficient computation via slicing and sorting. We approximate the joint distribution of the ground truth and the observations using discrete Wasserstein gradient flows and establish an error bound for the posterior distributions. Further, we prove that our particle flow is indeed a Wasserstein gradient flow of an appropriate functional. The power of our method is demonstrated by numerical examples including conditional image generation and inverse problems like superresolution, inpainting and computed tomography in low-dose and limited-angle settings.

In-context learning (ICL) is an astonishing emergent ability of large language models (LLMs). By presenting a prompt that includes multiple input-output pairs as examples and introducing a new query input, models can generate the corresponding output. However, the performance of models heavily relies on the quality of the input prompt when implementing in-context learning. Biased or imbalanced input prompts can significantly degrade the performance of language models. To address this issue, we introduce a reweighted algorithm called RICL (Reweighted In-context Learning). This algorithm fine-tunes language models using an unbiased validation set to determine the optimal weight for each input-output example to approximate unbiased in-context learning. Furthermore, we also introduce a low-cost reweighted algorithm, a linear optimal weight approximation algorithm called LARICL (Linear Approximation of Reweighted In-context Learning). This algorithm requires minimal training cost while providing effective results. We prove the convergence of our algorithm and validate its performance through experiments conducted on a numerical dataset. The experimental findings reveal a substantial improvement in comparison to benchmarks including the performance of casual prompt-based in-context learning and the performance of a classic fine-tuning method.

The number of local model-agnostic explanation techniques proposed has grown rapidly recently. One main reason is that the bar for developing new explainability techniques is low due to the lack of optimal evaluation measures. Without rigorous measures, it is hard to have concrete evidence of whether the new explanation techniques can significantly outperform their predecessors. Our study proposes a new taxonomy for evaluating local explanations: robustness, evaluation using ground truth from synthetic datasets and interpretable models, model randomization, and human-grounded evaluation. Using this proposed taxonomy, we highlight that all categories of evaluation methods, except those based on the ground truth from interpretable models, suffer from a problem we call the "blame problem." In our study, we argue that this category of evaluation measure is a more reasonable method for evaluating local model-agnostic explanations. However, we show that even this category of evaluation measures has further limitations. The evaluation of local explanations remains an open research problem.

Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL) has emerged as a popular unsupervised graph representation learning method. However, it has been shown that GCL is vulnerable to adversarial attacks on both the graph structure and node attributes. Although empirical approaches have been proposed to enhance the robustness of GCL, the certifiable robustness of GCL is still remain unexplored. In this paper, we develop the first certifiably robust framework in GCL. Specifically, we first propose a unified criteria to evaluate and certify the robustness of GCL. We then introduce a novel technique, RES (Randomized Edgedrop Smoothing), to ensure certifiable robustness for any GCL model, and this certified robustness can be provably preserved in downstream tasks. Furthermore, an effective training method is proposed for robust GCL. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method in providing effective certifiable robustness and enhancing the robustness of any GCL model. The source code of RES is available at https://github.com/ventr1c/RES-GCL.

Despite efforts to align large language models (LLMs) with human values, widely-used LLMs such as GPT, Llama, Claude, and PaLM are susceptible to jailbreaking attacks, wherein an adversary fools a targeted LLM into generating objectionable content. To address this vulnerability, we propose SmoothLLM, the first algorithm designed to mitigate jailbreaking attacks on LLMs. Based on our finding that adversarially-generated prompts are brittle to character-level changes, our defense first randomly perturbs multiple copies of a given input prompt, and then aggregates the corresponding predictions to detect adversarial inputs. SmoothLLM reduces the attack success rate on numerous popular LLMs to below one percentage point, avoids unnecessary conservatism, and admits provable guarantees on attack mitigation. Moreover, our defense uses exponentially fewer queries than existing attacks and is compatible with any LLM.

Brain tumors pose significant health challenges worldwide, with glioblastoma being one of the most aggressive forms. Accurate determination of the O6-methylguanine-DNA methyltransferase (MGMT) promoter methylation status is crucial for personalized treatment strategies. However, traditional methods are labor-intensive and time-consuming. This paper proposes a novel multi-modal approach, BTDNet, leveraging multi-parametric MRI scans, including FLAIR, T1w, T1wCE, and T2 3D volumes, to predict MGMT promoter methylation status. BTDNet addresses two main challenges: the variable volume lengths (i.e., each volume consists of a different number of slices) and the volume-level annotations (i.e., the whole 3D volume is annotated and not the independent slices that it consists of). BTDNet consists of four components: i) the data augmentation one (that performs geometric transformations, convex combinations of data pairs and test-time data augmentation); ii) the 3D analysis one (that performs global analysis through a CNN-RNN); iii) the routing one (that contains a mask layer that handles variable input feature lengths), and iv) the modality fusion one (that effectively enhances data representation, reduces ambiguities and mitigates data scarcity). The proposed method outperforms by large margins the state-of-the-art methods in the RSNA-ASNR-MICCAI BraTS 2021 Challenge, offering a promising avenue for enhancing brain tumor diagnosis and treatment.

Otago Exercise Program (OEP) is a rehabilitation program for older adults to improve frailty, sarcopenia, and balance. Accurate monitoring of patient involvement in OEP is challenging, as self-reports (diaries) are often unreliable. With the development of wearable sensors, Human Activity Recognition (HAR) systems using wearable sensors have revolutionized healthcare. However, their usage for OEP still shows limited performance. The objective of this study is to build an unobtrusive and accurate system to monitor OEP for older adults. Data was collected from older adults wearing a single waist-mounted Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). Two datasets were collected, one in a laboratory setting, and one at the homes of the patients. A hierarchical system is proposed with two stages: 1) using a deep learning model to recognize whether the patients are performing OEP or activities of daily life (ADLs) using a 10-minute sliding window; 2) based on stage 1, using a 6-second sliding window to recognize the OEP sub-classes performed. The results showed that in stage 1, OEP could be recognized with window-wise f1-scores over 0.95 and Intersection-over-Union (IoU) f1-scores over 0.85 for both datasets. In stage 2, for the home scenario, four activities could be recognized with f1-scores over 0.8: ankle plantarflexors, abdominal muscles, knee bends, and sit-to-stand. The results showed the potential of monitoring the compliance of OEP using a single IMU in daily life. Also, some OEP sub-classes are possible to be recognized for further analysis.

The Bayesian estimation of GARCH-family models has been typically addressed through Monte Carlo sampling. Variational Inference is gaining popularity and attention as a robust approach for Bayesian inference in complex machine learning models; however, its adoption in econometrics and finance is limited. This paper discusses the extent to which Variational Inference constitutes a reliable and feasible alternative to Monte Carlo sampling for Bayesian inference in GARCH-like models. Through a large-scale experiment involving the constituents of the S&P 500 index, several Variational Inference optimizers, a variety of volatility models, and a case study, we show that Variational Inference is an attractive, remarkably well-calibrated, and competitive method for Bayesian learning.

Large language models (LLMs) have initiated a paradigm shift in transfer learning. In contrast to the classic pretraining-then-finetuning procedure, in order to use LLMs for downstream prediction tasks, one only needs to provide a few demonstrations, known as in-context examples, without adding more or updating existing model parameters. This in-context learning (ICL) capability of LLMs is intriguing, and it is not yet fully understood how pretrained LLMs acquire such capabilities. In this paper, we investigate the reason why a transformer-based language model can accomplish in-context learning after pre-training on a general language corpus by proposing one hypothesis that LLMs can simulate kernel regression with internal representations when faced with in-context examples. More concretely, we first prove that Bayesian inference on in-context prompts can be asymptotically understood as kernel regression $\hat y = \sum_i y_i K(x, x_i)/\sum_i K(x, x_i)$ as the number of in-context demonstrations grows. Then, we empirically investigate the in-context behaviors of language models. We find that during ICL, the attention and hidden features in LLMs match the behaviors of a kernel regression. Finally, our theory provides insights into multiple phenomena observed in the ICL field: why retrieving demonstrative samples similar to test samples can help, why ICL performance is sensitive to the output formats, and why ICL accuracy benefits from selecting in-distribution and representative samples.

Variational dimensionality reduction methods are known for their high accuracy, generative abilities, and robustness. These methods have many theoretical justifications. Here we introduce a unifying principle rooted in information theory to rederive and generalize existing variational methods and design new ones. We base our framework on an interpretation of the multivariate information bottleneck, in which two Bayesian networks are traded off against one another. We interpret the first network as an encoder graph, which specifies what information to keep when compressing the data. We interpret the second network as a decoder graph, which specifies a generative model for the data. Using this framework, we rederive existing dimensionality reduction methods such as the deep variational information bottleneck (DVIB), beta variational auto-encoders (beta-VAE), and deep variational canonical correlation analysis (DVCCA). The framework naturally introduces a trade-off parameter between compression and reconstruction in the DVCCA family of algorithms, resulting in the new beta-DVCCA family. In addition, we derive a new variational dimensionality reduction method, deep variational symmetric informational bottleneck (DVSIB), which simultaneously compresses two variables to preserve information between their compressed representations. We implement all of these algorithms and evaluate their ability to produce shared low dimensional latent spaces on a modified noisy MNIST dataset. We show that algorithms that are better matched to the structure of the data (beta-DVCCA and DVSIB) produce better latent spaces as measured by classification accuracy and the dimensionality of the latent variables. We believe that this framework can be used to unify other multi-view representation learning algorithms. Additionally, it provides a straightforward framework for deriving problem-specific loss functions.

It is well known that canonical recurrent neural networks (RNNs) face limitations in learning long-term dependencies which have been addressed by memory structures in long short-term memory (LSTM) networks. Neural Turing machines (NTMs) are novel RNNs that implement the notion of programmable computers with neural network controllers that can learn simple algorithmic tasks. Matrix neural networks feature matrix representation which inherently preserves the spatial structure of data when compared to canonical neural networks that use vector-based representation. One may then argue that neural networks with matrix representations may have the potential to provide better memory capacity. In this paper, we define and study a probabilistic notion of memory capacity based on Fisher information for matrix-based RNNs. We find bounds on memory capacity for such networks under various hypotheses and compare them with their vector counterparts. In particular, we show that the memory capacity of such networks is bounded by $N^2$ for $N\times N$ state matrix which generalizes the one known for vector networks. We also show and analyze the increase in memory capacity for such networks which is introduced when one exhibits an external state memory, such as NTMs. Consequently, we construct NTMs with RNN controllers with matrix-based representation of external memory, leading us to introduce Matrix NTMs. We demonstrate the performance of this class of memory networks under certain algorithmic learning tasks such as copying and recall and compare it with Matrix RNNs. We find an improvement in the performance of Matrix NTMs by the addition of external memory, in comparison to Matrix RNNs.

(Abridged) Carmosino et al. (2016) demonstrated that natural proofs of circuit lower bounds for \Lambda imply efficient algorithms for learning \Lambda-circuits, but only over the uniform distribution, with membership queries, and provided \AC^0[p] \subseteq \Lambda. We consider whether this implication can be generalized to \Lambda \not\supseteq \AC^0[p], and to learning algorithms in Valiant's PAC model, which use only random examples and learn over arbitrary example distributions. We give results of both positive and negative flavor. On the negative side, we observe that if, for every circuit class \Lambda, the implication from natural proofs for \Lambda to learning \Lambda-circuits in Valiant's PAC model holds, then there is a polynomial time solution to O(n^{1.5})-uSVP (unique Shortest Vector Problem), and polynomial time quantum solutions to O(n^{1.5})-SVP (Shortest Vector Problem) and O(n^{1.5})-SIVP (Shortest Independent Vector Problem). This indicates that whether natural proofs for \Lambda imply efficient learning algorithms for \Lambda in Valiant's PAC model may depend on \Lambda. On the positive side, our main result is that specific natural proofs arising from a type of communication complexity argument (e.g., Nisan (1993), for depth-2 majority circuits) imply PAC-learning algorithms in a new distributional variant of Valiant's model. Our distributional PAC model is stronger than the average-case prediction model of Blum et al (1993) and the heuristic PAC model of Nanashima (2021), and has several important properties which make it of independent interest, such as being boosting-friendly. The main applications of our result are new distributional PAC-learning algorithms for depth-2 majority circuits, polytopes and DNFs over natural target distributions, as well as the nonexistence of encoded-input weak PRFs that can be evaluated by depth-2 majority circuits.

Over-the-Air (OtA) Federated Learning (FL) refers to an FL system where multiple agents apply OtA computation for transmitting model updates to a common edge server. Two important features of OtA computation, namely linear processing and signal-level superposition, motivate the use of linear compression with compressed sensing (CS) methods to reduce the number of data samples transmitted over the channel. The previous works on applying CS methods in OtA FL have primarily assumed that the original model update vectors are sparse, or they have been sparsified before compression. However, it is unclear whether linear compression with CS-based reconstruction is more effective than directly sending the non-zero elements in the sparsified update vectors, under the same total power constraint. In this study, we examine and compare several communication designs with or without sparsification. Our findings demonstrate that sparsification before compression is not necessary. Alternatively, sparsification without linear compression can also achieve better performance than the commonly considered setup that combines both.

Being able to identify functions of interest in cross-architecture software is useful whether you are analysing for malware, securing the software supply chain or conducting vulnerability research. Cross-Architecture Binary Code Similarity Search has been explored in numerous studies and has used a wide range of different data sources to achieve its goals. The data sources typically used draw on common structures derived from binaries such as function control flow graphs or binary level call graphs, the output of the disassembly process or the outputs of a dynamic analysis approach. One data source which has received less attention is binary intermediate representations. Binary Intermediate representations possess two interesting properties: they are cross architecture by their very nature and encode the semantics of a function explicitly to support downstream usage. Within this paper we propose Function as a String Encoded Representation (FASER) which combines long document transformers with the use of intermediate representations to create a model capable of cross architecture function search without the need for manual feature engineering, pre-training or a dynamic analysis step. We compare our approach against a series of baseline approaches for two tasks; A general function search task and a targeted vulnerability search task. Our approach demonstrates strong performance across both tasks, performing better than all baseline approaches.

Increasing the context length of large language models (LLMs) unlocks fundamentally new capabilities, but also significantly increases the memory footprints of training. Previous model-parallel systems such as Megatron-LM partition and compute different attention heads in parallel, resulting in large communication volumes, so they cannot scale beyond the number of attention heads, thereby hindering its adoption. In this paper, we introduce a new approach, LightSeq, for long-context LLMs training. LightSeq has many notable advantages. First, LightSeq partitions over the sequence dimension, hence is agnostic to model architectures and readily applicable for models with varying numbers of attention heads, such as Multi-Head, Multi-Query and Grouped-Query attention. Second, LightSeq not only requires up to 4.7x less communication than Megatron-LM on popular LLMs but also overlaps the communication with computation. To further reduce the training time, LightSeq features a novel gradient checkpointing scheme to bypass an forward computation for memory-efficient attention. We evaluate LightSeq on Llama-7B and its variants with sequence lengths from 32K to 512K. Through comprehensive experiments on single and cross-node training, we show that LightSeq achieves up to 1.24-2.01x end-to-end speedup, and a 2-8x longer sequence length on models with fewer heads, compared to Megatron-LM. Codes will be available at https://github.com/RulinShao/LightSeq.

Inspired by recent developments in attention models for image classification and natural language processing, we present various Attention based architectures in reinforcement learning (RL) domain, capable of performing well on OpenAI Gym Atari-2600 game suite. In spite of the recent success of Deep Reinforcement learning techniques in various fields like robotics, gaming and healthcare, they suffer from a major drawback that neural networks are difficult to interpret. We try to get around this problem with the help of Attention based models. In Attention based models, extracting and overlaying of attention map onto images allows for direct observation of information used by agent to select actions and easier interpretation of logic behind the chosen actions. Our models in addition to playing well on gym-Atari environments, also provide insights on how agent perceives its environment. In addition, motivated by recent developments in attention based video-classification models using Vision Transformer, we come up with an architecture based on Vision Transformer, for image-based RL domain too. Compared to previous works in Vision Transformer, our model is faster to train and requires fewer computational resources. 3

Machine learning, and representation learning in particular, has the potential to facilitate drug discovery by screening a large chemical space in silico. A successful approach for representing molecules is to treat them as a graph and utilize graph neural networks. One of the key limitations of such methods is the necessity to represent compounds with different numbers of atoms, which requires aggregating the atom's information. Common aggregation operators, such as averaging, result in loss of information at the atom level. In this work, we propose a novel aggregating approach where each atom is weighted non-linearly using the Boltzmann distribution with a hyperparameter analogous to temperature. We show that using this weighted aggregation improves the ability of the gold standard message-passing neural network to predict antibiotic activity. Moreover, by changing the temperature hyperparameter, our approach can reveal the atoms that are important for activity prediction in a smooth and consistent way, thus providing a novel, regulated attention mechanism for graph neural networks. We further validate our method by showing that it recapitulates the functional group in beta-Lactam antibiotics. The ability of our approach to rank the atoms' importance for a desired function can be used within any graph neural network to provide interpretability of the results and predictions at the node level.

This paper investigates new families of compositional optimization problems, called $\underline{\bf n}$on-$\underline{\bf s}$mooth $\underline{\bf w}$eakly-$\underline{\bf c}$onvex $\underline{\bf f}$inite-sum $\underline{\bf c}$oupled $\underline{\bf c}$ompositional $\underline{\bf o}$ptimization (NSWC FCCO). There has been a growing interest in FCCO due to its wide-ranging applications in machine learning and AI, as well as its ability to address the shortcomings of stochastic algorithms based on empirical risk minimization. However, current research on FCCO presumes that both the inner and outer functions are smooth, limiting their potential to tackle a more diverse set of problems. Our research expands on this area by examining non-smooth weakly-convex FCCO, where the outer function is weakly convex and non-decreasing, and the inner function is weakly-convex. We analyze a single-loop algorithm and establish its complexity for finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point of the Moreau envelop of the objective function. Additionally, we also extend the algorithm to solving novel non-smooth weakly-convex tri-level finite-sum coupled compositional optimization problems, which feature a nested arrangement of three functions. Lastly, we explore the applications of our algorithms in deep learning for two-way partial AUC maximization and multi-instance two-way partial AUC maximization, using empirical studies to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.

Embedding plays a critical role in modern recommender systems because they are virtual representations of real-world entities and the foundation for subsequent decision models. In this paper, we propose a novel embedding update mechanism, Structure-aware Embedding Evolution (SEvo for short), to encourage related nodes to evolve similarly at each step. Unlike GNN (Graph Neural Network) that typically serves as an intermediate part, SEvo is able to directly inject the graph structure information into embedding with negligible computational overhead in training. The convergence properties of SEvo as well as its possible variants are theoretically analyzed to justify the validity of the designs. Moreover, SEvo can be seamlessly integrated into existing optimizers for state-of-the-art performance. In particular, SEvo-enhanced AdamW with moment estimate correction demonstrates consistent improvements across a spectrum of models and datasets, suggesting a novel technical route to effectively utilize graph structure information beyond explicit GNN modules.

With the blowout development of pre-trained models (PTMs), the efficient tuning of these models for diverse downstream applications has emerged as a pivotal research concern. Although recent investigations into prompt tuning have provided promising avenues, three salient challenges persist: (1) memory constraint: the continuous growth in the size of open-source PTMs renders fine-tuning, even a fraction of their parameters, challenging for many practitioners. (2) model privacy: existing PTMs often function as public API services, with their parameters inaccessible for effective or tailored fine-tuning. (3) data privacy: the fine-tuning of PTMs necessitates high-quality datasets, which are typically localized and not shared to public. To optimally harness each local dataset while navigating memory constraints and preserving privacy, we propose Federated Black-Box Prompt Tuning (Fed-BBPT). This innovative approach eschews reliance on parameter architectures and private dataset access, instead capitalizing on a central server that aids local users in collaboratively training a prompt generator through regular aggregation. Local users leverage API-driven learning via a zero-order optimizer, obviating the need for PTM deployment. Relative to extensive fine-tuning, Fed-BBPT proficiently sidesteps memory challenges tied to PTM storage and fine-tuning on local machines, tapping into comprehensive, high-quality, yet private training datasets. A thorough evaluation across 40 datasets spanning CV and NLP tasks underscores the robustness of our proposed model.

Large Language Models (LLM) and foundation models are popular as they offer new opportunities for individuals and businesses to improve natural language processing, interact with data, and retrieve information faster. However, training or fine-tuning LLMs requires a vast amount of data, which can be challenging to access due to legal or technical restrictions and may require private computing resources. Federated Learning (FL) is a solution designed to overcome these challenges and expand data access for deep learning applications. This paper takes a hardware-centric approach to explore how LLMs can be brought to modern edge computing systems. Our study fine-tunes the FLAN-T5 model family, ranging from 80M to 3B parameters, using FL for a text summarization task. We provide a micro-level hardware benchmark, compare the model FLOP utilization to a state-of-the-art data center GPU, and study the network utilization in realistic conditions. Our contribution is twofold: First, we evaluate the current capabilities of edge computing systems and their potential for LLM FL workloads. Second, by comparing these systems with a data-center GPU, we demonstrate the potential for improvement and the next steps toward achieving greater computational efficiency at the edge.

The Internet of Things (IoT) consistently generates vast amounts of data, sparking increasing concern over the protection of data privacy and the limitation of data misuse. Federated learning (FL) facilitates collaborative capabilities among multiple parties by sharing machine learning (ML) model parameters instead of raw user data, and it has recently gained significant attention for its potential in privacy preservation and learning efficiency enhancement. In this paper, we highlight the digital ethics concerns that arise when human-centric devices serve as clients in FL. More specifically, challenges of game dynamics, fairness, incentive, and continuity arise in FL due to differences in perspectives and objectives between clients and the server. We analyze these challenges and their solutions from the perspectives of both the client and the server, and through the viewpoints of centralized and decentralized FL. Finally, we explore the opportunities in FL for human-centric IoT as directions for future development.

Tabular data prediction is a fundamental machine learning task for many applications. Existing methods predominantly employ discriminative modeling and operate under the assumption of a fixed target column, necessitating re-training for every new predictive task. Inspired by the generative power of large language models (LLMs), this paper exploits the idea of building universal tabular data predictors based on generative modeling, namely UniPredict. Here, we show that scaling up an LLM to extensive tabular datasets with the capability of comprehending diverse tabular inputs and predicting for target variables following the input instructions. Specifically, we train a single LLM on an aggregation of 169 tabular datasets with diverse targets and compare its performance against baselines that are trained on each dataset separately. We observe this versatile UniPredict model demonstrates an advantage over other models, ranging from 5.4% to 13.4%, when compared with the best tree-boosting baseline and the best neural network baseline, respectively. We further test UniPredict in few-shot learning settings on another 62 tabular datasets. Our method achieves strong performance in quickly adapting to new tasks, where our method outperforms XGBoost over 100% on the low-resource setup and shows a significant margin over all baselines. We envision that UniPredict sheds light on developing a universal tabular data prediction system that learns from data at scale and serves a wide range of prediction tasks.

Machine learning plays an important and growing role in molecular simulation. The newest version of the OpenMM molecular dynamics toolkit introduces new features to support the use of machine learning potentials. Arbitrary PyTorch models can be added to a simulation and used to compute forces and energy. A higher-level interface allows users to easily model their molecules of interest with general purpose, pretrained potential functions. A collection of optimized CUDA kernels and custom PyTorch operations greatly improves the speed of simulations. We demonstrate these features on simulations of cyclin-dependent kinase 8 (CDK8) and the green fluorescent protein (GFP) chromophore in water. Taken together, these features make it practical to use machine learning to improve the accuracy of simulations at only a modest increase in cost.

Various data imbalances that naturally arise in a multi-territory personalized recommender system can lead to a significant item bias for globally prevalent items. A locally popular item can be overshadowed by a globally prevalent item. Moreover, users' viewership patterns/statistics can drastically change from one geographic location to another which may suggest to learn specific user embeddings. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning (MTL) technique, along with an adaptive upsampling method to reduce popularity bias in multi-territory recommendations. Our proposed framework is designed to enrich training examples with active users representation through upsampling, and capable of learning geographic-based user embeddings by leveraging MTL. Through experiments, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in multiple territories compared to a baseline not incorporating our proposed techniques.~Noticeably, we show improved relative gain of up to $65.27\%$ in PR-AUC metric. A case study is presented to demonstrate the advantages of our methods in attenuating the popularity bias of global items.

Deep learning has become a powerful tool in computational biology, revolutionising the analysis and interpretation of biological data over time. In our article review, we delve into various aspects of deep learning in computational biology. Specifically, we examine its history, advantages, and challenges. Our focus is on two primary applications: DNA sequence classification and prediction, as well as protein structure prediction from sequence data. Additionally, we provide insights into the outlook for this field. To fully harness the potential of deep learning in computational biology, it is crucial to address the challenges that come with it. These challenges include the requirement for large, labelled datasets and the interpretability of deep learning models. The use of deep learning in the analysis of DNA sequences has brought about a significant transformation in the detection of genomic variants and the analysis of gene expression. This has greatly contributed to the advancement of personalised medicine and drug discovery. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been shown to be highly accurate in predicting genetic variations and gene expression levels. Deep learning techniques are used for analysing epigenetic data, including DNA methylation and histone modifications. This provides valuable insights into metabolic conditions and gene regulation. The field of protein structure prediction has been significantly impacted by deep learning, which has enabled accurate determination of the three-dimensional shape of proteins and prediction of their interactions. The future of deep learning in computational biology looks promising. With the development of advanced deep learning models and interpretation techniques, there is potential to overcome current challenges and further our understanding of biological systems.

Machine scheduling aims to optimize job assignments to machines while adhering to manufacturing rules and job specifications. This optimization leads to reduced operational costs, improved customer demand fulfillment, and enhanced production efficiency. However, machine scheduling remains a challenging combinatorial problem due to its NP-hard nature. Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), a key component of artificial general intelligence, has shown promise in various domains like gaming and robotics. Researchers have explored applying DRL to machine scheduling problems since 1995. This paper offers a comprehensive review and comparison of DRL-based approaches, highlighting their methodology, applications, advantages, and limitations. It categorizes these approaches based on computational components: conventional neural networks, encoder-decoder architectures, graph neural networks, and metaheuristic algorithms. Our review concludes that DRL-based methods outperform exact solvers, heuristics, and tabular reinforcement learning algorithms in terms of computation speed and generating near-global optimal solutions. These DRL-based approaches have been successfully applied to static and dynamic scheduling across diverse machine environments and job characteristics. However, DRL-based schedulers face limitations in handling complex operational constraints, configurable multi-objective optimization, generalization, scalability, interpretability, and robustness. Addressing these challenges will be a crucial focus for future research in this field. This paper serves as a valuable resource for researchers to assess the current state of DRL-based machine scheduling and identify research gaps. It also aids experts and practitioners in selecting the appropriate DRL approach for production scheduling.

Latent space Energy-Based Models (EBMs), also known as energy-based priors, have drawn growing interests in the field of generative modeling due to its flexibility in the formulation and strong modeling power of the latent space. However, the common practice of learning latent space EBMs with non-convergent short-run MCMC for prior and posterior sampling is hindering the model from further progress; the degenerate MCMC sampling quality in practice often leads to degraded generation quality and instability in training, especially with highly multi-modal and/or high-dimensional target distributions. To remedy this sampling issue, in this paper we introduce a simple but effective diffusion-based amortization method for long-run MCMC sampling and develop a novel learning algorithm for the latent space EBM based on it. We provide theoretical evidence that the learned amortization of MCMC is a valid long-run MCMC sampler. Experiments on several image modeling benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared with strong counterparts

By now there is substantial evidence that deep learning models learn certain human-interpretable features as part of their internal representations of data. As having the right (or wrong) concepts is critical to trustworthy machine learning systems, it is natural to ask which inputs from the model's original training set were most important for learning a concept at a given layer. To answer this, we combine data attribution methods with methods for probing the concepts learned by a model. Training network and probe ensembles for two concept datasets on a range of network layers, we use the recently developed TRAK method for large-scale data attribution. We find some evidence for convergence, where removing the 10,000 top attributing images for a concept and retraining the model does not change the location of the concept in the network nor the probing sparsity of the concept. This suggests that rather than being highly dependent on a few specific examples, the features that inform the development of a concept are spread in a more diffuse manner across its exemplars, implying robustness in concept formation.

Traditional deep learning (DL) suffers from two core problems. Firstly, it assumes training samples are independent and identically distributed. However, numerous real-world datasets group samples by shared measurements (e.g., study participants or cells), violating this assumption. In these scenarios, DL can show compromised performance, limited generalization, and interpretability issues, coupled with cluster confounding causing Type 1 and 2 errors. Secondly, models are typically trained for overall accuracy, often neglecting underrepresented groups and introducing biases in crucial areas like loan approvals or determining health insurance rates, such biases can significantly impact one's quality of life. To address both of these challenges simultaneously, we present a mixed effects deep learning (MEDL) framework. MEDL separately quantifies cluster-invariant fixed effects (FE) and cluster-specific random effects (RE) through the introduction of: 1) a cluster adversary which encourages the learning of cluster-invariant FE, 2) a Bayesian neural network which quantifies the RE, and a mixing function combining the FE an RE into a mixed-effect prediction. We marry this MEDL with adversarial debiasing, which promotes equality-of-odds fairness across FE, RE, and ME predictions for fairness-sensitive variables. We evaluated our approach using three datasets: two from census/finance focusing on income classification and one from healthcare predicting hospitalization duration, a regression task. Our framework notably enhances fairness across all sensitive variables-increasing fairness up to 82% for age, 43% for race, 86% for sex, and 27% for marital-status. Besides promoting fairness, our method maintains the robust performance and clarity of MEDL. It's versatile, suitable for various dataset types and tasks, making it broadly applicable. Our GitHub repository houses the implementation.

Medical image classification is a critical problem for healthcare, with the potential to alleviate the workload of doctors and facilitate diagnoses of patients. However, two challenges arise when deploying deep learning models to real-world healthcare applications. First, neural models tend to learn spurious correlations instead of desired features, which could fall short when generalizing to new domains (e.g., patients with different ages). Second, these black-box models lack interpretability. When making diagnostic predictions, it is important to understand why a model makes a decision for trustworthy and safety considerations. In this paper, to address these two limitations, we propose a new paradigm to build robust and interpretable medical image classifiers with natural language concepts. Specifically, we first query clinical concepts from GPT-4, then transform latent image features into explicit concepts with a vision-language model. We systematically evaluate our method on eight medical image classification datasets to verify its effectiveness. On challenging datasets with strong confounding factors, our method can mitigate spurious correlations thus substantially outperform standard visual encoders and other baselines. Finally, we show how classification with a small number of concepts brings a level of interpretability for understanding model decisions through case studies in real medical data.

Twitter is currently one of the biggest social media platforms. Its users may share, read, and engage with short posts called tweets. For the ACM Recommender Systems Conference 2020, Twitter published a dataset around 70 GB in size for the annual RecSys Challenge. In 2020, the RecSys Challenge invited participating teams to create models that would predict engagement likelihoods for given user-tweet combinations. The submitted models predicting like, reply, retweet, and quote engagements were evaluated based on two metrics: area under the precision-recall curve (PRAUC) and relative cross-entropy (RCE). In this diploma thesis, we used the RecSys 2020 Challenge dataset and evaluation procedure to investigate how well context alone may be used to predict tweet engagement likelihood. In doing so, we employed the Spark engine on TU Wien's Little Big Data Cluster to create scalable data preprocessing, feature engineering, feature selection, and machine learning pipelines. We manually created just under 200 additional features to describe tweet context. The results indicate that features describing users' prior engagement history and the popularity of hashtags and links in the tweet were the most informative. We also found that factors such as the prediction algorithm, training dataset size, training dataset sampling method, and feature selection significantly affect the results. After comparing the best results of our context-only prediction models with content-only models and with models developed by the Challenge winners, we identified that the context-based models underperformed in terms of the RCE score. This work thus concludes by situating this discrepancy and proposing potential improvements to our implementation, which is shared in a public git repository.

Network Intrusion Detection System (NIDS) is a key component in securing the computer network from various cyber security threats and network attacks. However, consider an unfortunate situation where the NIDS is itself attacked and vulnerable more specifically, we can say, How to defend the defender?. In Adversarial Machine Learning (AML), the malicious actors aim to fool the Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL) models to produce incorrect predictions with intentionally crafted adversarial examples. These adversarial perturbed examples have become the biggest vulnerability of ML and DL based systems and are major obstacles to their adoption in real-time and mission-critical applications such as NIDS. AML is an emerging research domain, and it has become a necessity for the in-depth study of adversarial attacks and their defence strategies to safeguard the computer network from various cyber security threads. In this research work, we aim to cover important aspects related to NIDS, adversarial attacks and its defence mechanism to increase the robustness of the ML and DL based NIDS. We implemented four powerful adversarial attack techniques, namely, Fast Gradient Sign Method (FGSM), Jacobian Saliency Map Attack (JSMA), Projected Gradient Descent (PGD) and Carlini & Wagner (C&W) in NIDS. We analyzed its performance in terms of various performance metrics in detail. Furthermore, the three heuristics defence strategies, i.e., Adversarial Training (AT), Gaussian Data Augmentation (GDA) and High Confidence (HC), are implemented to improve the NIDS robustness under adversarial attack situations. The complete workflow is demonstrated in real-time network with data packet flow. This research work provides the overall background for the researchers interested in AML and its implementation from a computer network security point of view.

Federated learning is a distributed machine learning paradigm that allows multiple clients to collaboratively train a shared model with their local data. Nonetheless, conventional federated learning algorithms often struggle to generalize well due to the ubiquitous domain shift across clients. In this work, we consider a challenging yet realistic federated learning scenario where the training data of each client originates from different domains. We address the challenges of domain shift by leveraging the technique of prompt learning, and propose a novel method called Federated Dual Prompt Tuning (Fed-DPT). Specifically, Fed-DPT employs a pre-trained vision-language model and then applies both visual and textual prompt tuning to facilitate domain adaptation over decentralized data. Extensive experiments of Fed-DPT demonstrate its significant effectiveness in domain-aware federated learning. With a pre-trained CLIP model (ViT-Base as image encoder), the proposed Fed-DPT attains 68.4% average accuracy over six domains in the DomainNet dataset, which improves the original CLIP by a large margin of 14.8%.

We investigate the variational optimality (specifically, the Banach space optimality) of a large class of neural architectures with multivariate nonlinearities/activation functions. To that end, we construct a new family of Banach spaces defined via a regularization operator and the $k$-plane transform. We prove a representer theorem that states that the solution sets to learning problems posed over these Banach spaces are completely characterized by neural architectures with multivariate nonlinearities. These optimal architectures have skip connections and are tightly connected to orthogonal weight normalization and multi-index models, both of which have received considerable interest in the neural network community. Our framework is compatible with a number of classical nonlinearities including the rectified linear unit (ReLU) activation function, the norm activation function, and the radial basis functions found in the theory of thin-plate/polyharmonic splines. We also show that the underlying spaces are special instances of reproducing kernel Banach spaces and variation spaces. Our results shed light on the regularity of functions learned by neural networks trained on data, particularly with multivariate nonlinearities, and provide new theoretical motivation for several architectural choices found in practice.

Probabilistic modelling of power systems operation and planning processes depends on data-driven methods, which require sufficiently large datasets. When historical data lacks this, it is desired to model the underlying data generation mechanism as a probability distribution to assess the data quality and generate more data, if needed. Kernel density estimation (KDE) based models are popular choices for this task, but they fail to adapt to data regions with varying densities. In this paper, an adaptive KDE model is employed to circumvent this, where each kernel in the model has an individual bandwidth. The leave-one-out maximum log-likelihood (LOO-MLL) criterion is proposed to prevent the singular solutions that the regular MLL criterion gives rise to, and it is proven that LOO-MLL prevents these. Relying on this guaranteed robustness, the model is extended by assigning learnable weights to the kernels. In addition, a modified expectation-maximization algorithm is employed to accelerate the optimization speed reliably. The performance of the proposed method and models are exhibited on two power systems datasets using different statistical tests and by comparison with Gaussian mixture models. Results show that the proposed models have promising performance, in addition to their singularity prevention guarantees.

We propose a federated averaging Langevin algorithm (FA-LD) for uncertainty quantification and mean predictions with distributed clients. In particular, we generalize beyond normal posterior distributions and consider a general class of models. We develop theoretical guarantees for FA-LD for strongly log-concave distributions with non-i.i.d data and study how the injected noise and the stochastic-gradient noise, the heterogeneity of data, and the varying learning rates affect the convergence. Such an analysis sheds light on the optimal choice of local updates to minimize communication costs. Important to our approach is that the communication efficiency does not deteriorate with the injected noise in the Langevin algorithms. In addition, we examine in our FA-LD algorithm both independent and correlated noise used over different clients. We observe there is a trade-off between the pairs among communication, accuracy, and data privacy. As local devices may become inactive in federated networks, we also show convergence results based on different averaging schemes where only partial device updates are available. In such a case, we discover an additional bias that does not decay to zero.

In 1976, Lai constructed a nontrivial confidence sequence for the mean $\mu$ of a Gaussian distribution with unknown variance $\sigma$. Curiously, he employed both an improper (right Haar) mixture over $\sigma$ and an improper (flat) mixture over $\mu$. Here, we elaborate carefully on the details of his construction, which use generalized nonintegrable martingales and an extended Ville's inequality. While this does yield a sequential t-test, it does not yield an ``e-process'' (due to the nonintegrability of his martingale). In this paper, we develop two new e-processes and confidence sequences for the same setting: one is a test martingale in a reduced filtration, while the other is an e-process in the canonical data filtration. These are respectively obtained by swapping Lai's flat mixture for a Gaussian mixture, and swapping the right Haar mixture over $\sigma$ with the maximum likelihood estimate under the null, as done in universal inference. We also analyze the width of resulting confidence sequences, which have a curious dependence on the error probability $\alpha$. Numerical experiments are provided along the way to compare and contrast the various approaches.

Most popular dimension reduction (DR) methods like t-SNE and UMAP are based on minimizing a cost between input and latent pairwise similarities. Though widely used, these approaches lack clear probabilistic foundations to enable a full understanding of their properties and limitations. To that extent, we introduce a unifying statistical framework based on the coupling of hidden graphs using cross entropy. These graphs induce a Markov random field dependency structure among the observations in both input and latent spaces. We show that existing pairwise similarity DR methods can be retrieved from our framework with particular choices of priors for the graphs. Moreover this reveals that these methods suffer from a statistical deficiency that explains poor performances in conserving coarse-grain dependencies. Our model is leveraged and extended to address this issue while new links are drawn with Laplacian eigenmaps and PCA.

Building machines that can reason about physical events and their causal relationships is crucial for flexible interaction with the physical world. However, most existing physical and causal reasoning benchmarks are exclusively based on synthetically generated events and synthetic natural language descriptions of causal relationships. This design brings up two issues. First, there is a lack of diversity in both event types and natural language descriptions; second, causal relationships based on manually-defined heuristics are different from human judgments. To address both shortcomings, we present the CLEVRER-Humans benchmark, a video reasoning dataset for causal judgment of physical events with human labels. We employ two techniques to improve data collection efficiency: first, a novel iterative event cloze task to elicit a new representation of events in videos, which we term Causal Event Graphs (CEGs); second, a data augmentation technique based on neural language generative models. We convert the collected CEGs into questions and answers to be consistent with prior work. Finally, we study a collection of baseline approaches for CLEVRER-Humans question-answering, highlighting the great challenges set forth by our benchmark.

Bayesian optimization is an effective method for optimizing expensive-to-evaluate black-box functions. High-dimensional problems are particularly challenging as the surrogate model of the objective suffers from the curse of dimensionality, which makes accurate modeling difficult. We propose a group testing approach to identify active variables to facilitate efficient optimization in these domains. The proposed algorithm, Group Testing Bayesian Optimization (GTBO), first runs a testing phase where groups of variables are systematically selected and tested on whether they influence the objective. To that end, we extend the well-established theory of group testing to functions of continuous ranges. In the second phase, GTBO guides optimization by placing more importance on the active dimensions. By exploiting the axis-aligned subspace assumption, GTBO is competitive against state-of-the-art methods on several synthetic and real-world high-dimensional optimization tasks. Furthermore, GTBO aids in the discovery of active parameters in applications, thereby enhancing practitioners' understanding of the problem at hand.

Surrogate models play a crucial role in retrospectively interpreting complex and powerful black box machine learning models via model distillation. This paper focuses on using model-based trees as surrogate models which partition the feature space into interpretable regions via decision rules. Within each region, interpretable models based on additive main effects are used to approximate the behavior of the black box model, striking for an optimal balance between interpretability and performance. Four model-based tree algorithms, namely SLIM, GUIDE, MOB, and CTree, are compared regarding their ability to generate such surrogate models. We investigate fidelity, interpretability, stability, and the algorithms' capability to capture interaction effects through appropriate splits. Based on our comprehensive analyses, we finally provide an overview of user-specific recommendations.

Recent experiments have shown that, often, when training a neural network with gradient descent (GD) with a step size $\eta$, the operator norm of the Hessian of the loss grows until it approximately reaches $2/\eta$, after which it fluctuates around this value. The quantity $2/\eta$ has been called the "edge of stability" based on consideration of a local quadratic approximation of the loss. We perform a similar calculation to arrive at an "edge of stability" for Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), a variant of GD which has been shown to improve its generalization. Unlike the case for GD, the resulting SAM-edge depends on the norm of the gradient. Using three deep learning training tasks, we see empirically that SAM operates on the edge of stability identified by this analysis.

We study the distribution of a fully connected neural network with random Gaussian weights and biases in which the hidden layer widths are proportional to a large constant $n$. Under mild assumptions on the non-linearity, we obtain quantitative bounds on normal approximations valid at large but finite $n$ and any fixed network depth. Our theorems show both for the finite-dimensional distributions and the entire process, that the distance between a random fully connected network (and its derivatives) to the corresponding infinite width Gaussian process scales like $n^{-\gamma}$ for $\gamma>0$, with the exponent depending on the metric used to measure discrepancy. Our bounds are strictly stronger in terms of their dependence on network width than any previously available in the literature; in the one-dimensional case, we also prove that they are optimal, i.e., we establish matching lower bounds.

Sparse deep learning has become a popular technique for improving the performance of deep neural networks in areas such as uncertainty quantification, variable selection, and large-scale network compression. However, most existing research has focused on problems where the observations are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), and there has been little work on the problems where the observations are dependent, such as time series data and sequential data in natural language processing. This paper aims to address this gap by studying the theory for sparse deep learning with dependent data. We show that sparse recurrent neural networks (RNNs) can be consistently estimated, and their predictions are asymptotically normally distributed under appropriate assumptions, enabling the prediction uncertainty to be correctly quantified. Our numerical results show that sparse deep learning outperforms state-of-the-art methods, such as conformal predictions, in prediction uncertainty quantification for time series data. Furthermore, our results indicate that the proposed method can consistently identify the autoregressive order for time series data and outperform existing methods in large-scale model compression. Our proposed method has important practical implications in fields such as finance, healthcare, and energy, where both accurate point estimates and prediction uncertainty quantification are of concern.

We present a versatile adaptation of existing dimensionality reduction (DR) objectives, enabling the simultaneous reduction of both sample and feature sizes. Correspondances between input and embedding samples are computed through a semi-relaxed Gromov-Wasserstein optimal transport (OT) problem. When the embedding sample size matches that of the input, our model recovers classical popular DR models. When the embedding's dimensionality is unconstrained, we show that the OT plan delivers a competitive hard clustering. We emphasize the importance of intermediate stages that blend DR and clustering for summarizing real data and apply our method to visualize datasets of images.

An extension of Transformers is proposed that enables explicit relational reasoning through a novel module called the Abstractor. At the core of the Abstractor is a variant of attention called relational cross-attention. The approach is motivated by an architectural inductive bias for relational learning that disentangles relational information from extraneous features about individual objects. This enables explicit relational reasoning, supporting abstraction and generalization from limited data. The Abstractor is first evaluated on simple discriminative relational tasks and compared to existing relational architectures. Next, the Abstractor is evaluated on purely relational sequence-to-sequence tasks, where dramatic improvements are seen in sample efficiency compared to standard Transformers. Finally, Abstractors are evaluated on a collection of tasks based on mathematical problem solving, where modest but consistent improvements in performance and sample efficiency are observed.

The symmetry and geometry of input data are considered to be encoded in the internal data representation inside the neural network, but the specific encoding rule has been less investigated. By focusing on a joint group invariant function on the data-parameter domain, we present a systematic rule to find a dual group action on the parameter domain from a group action on the data domain. Further, we introduce generalized neural networks induced from the joint invariant functions, and present a new group theoretic proof of their universality theorems by using Schur's lemma. Since traditional universality theorems were demonstrated based on functional analytical methods, this study sheds light on the group theoretic aspect of the approximation theory, connecting geometric deep learning to abstract harmonic analysis.

Many modern algorithms for inverse problems and data assimilation rely on ensemble Kalman updates to blend prior predictions with observed data. Ensemble Kalman methods often perform well with a small ensemble size, which is essential in applications where generating each particle is costly. This paper develops a non-asymptotic analysis of ensemble Kalman updates that rigorously explains why a small ensemble size suffices if the prior covariance has moderate effective dimension due to fast spectrum decay or approximate sparsity. We present our theory in a unified framework, comparing several implementations of ensemble Kalman updates that use perturbed observations, square root filtering, and localization. As part of our analysis, we develop new dimension-free covariance estimation bounds for approximately sparse matrices that may be of independent interest.

Despite efforts to align large language models (LLMs) with human values, widely-used LLMs such as GPT, Llama, Claude, and PaLM are susceptible to jailbreaking attacks, wherein an adversary fools a targeted LLM into generating objectionable content. To address this vulnerability, we propose SmoothLLM, the first algorithm designed to mitigate jailbreaking attacks on LLMs. Based on our finding that adversarially-generated prompts are brittle to character-level changes, our defense first randomly perturbs multiple copies of a given input prompt, and then aggregates the corresponding predictions to detect adversarial inputs. SmoothLLM reduces the attack success rate on numerous popular LLMs to below one percentage point, avoids unnecessary conservatism, and admits provable guarantees on attack mitigation. Moreover, our defense uses exponentially fewer queries than existing attacks and is compatible with any LLM.

Diffusion models are a powerful class of generative models which simulate stochastic differential equations (SDEs) to generate data from noise. Although diffusion models have achieved remarkable progress in recent years, they have limitations in the unpaired image-to-image translation tasks due to the Gaussian prior assumption. Schr\"odinger Bridge (SB), which learns an SDE to translate between two arbitrary distributions, have risen as an attractive solution to this problem. However, none of SB models so far have been successful at unpaired translation between high-resolution images. In this work, we propose the Unpaired Neural Schr\"odinger Bridge (UNSB), which expresses SB problem as a sequence of adversarial learning problems. This allows us to incorporate advanced discriminators and regularization to learn a SB between unpaired data. We demonstrate that UNSB is scalable and successfully solves various unpaired image-to-image translation tasks. Code: \url{https://github.com/cyclomon/UNSB}

It is a crucial challenge to reconstruct population dynamics using unlabeled samples from distributions at coarse time intervals. Recent approaches such as flow-based models or Schr\"odinger Bridge (SB) models have demonstrated appealing performance, yet the inferred sample trajectories either fail to account for the underlying stochasticity or are $\underline{D}$eep $\underline{M}$omentum Multi-Marginal $\underline{S}$chr\"odinger $\underline{B}$ridge(DMSB), a novel computational framework that learns the smooth measure-valued spline for stochastic systems that satisfy position marginal constraints across time. By tailoring the celebrated Bregman Iteration and extending the Iteration Proportional Fitting to phase space, we manage to handle high-dimensional multi-marginal trajectory inference tasks efficiently. Our algorithm outperforms baselines significantly, as evidenced by experiments for synthetic datasets and a real-world single-cell RNA sequence dataset. Additionally, the proposed approach can reasonably reconstruct the evolution of velocity distribution, from position snapshots only, when there is a ground truth velocity that is nevertheless inaccessible.

The mathematical forces at work behind Generative Adversarial Networks raise challenging theoretical issues. Motivated by the important question of characterizing the geometrical properties of the generated distributions, we provide a thorough analysis of Wasserstein GANs (WGANs) in both the finite sample and asymptotic regimes. We study the specific case where the latent space is univariate and derive results valid regardless of the dimension of the output space. We show in particular that for a fixed sample size, the optimal WGANs are closely linked with connected paths minimizing the sum of the squared Euclidean distances between the sample points. We also highlight the fact that WGANs are able to approach (for the 1-Wasserstein distance) the target distribution as the sample size tends to infinity, at a given convergence rate and provided the family of generative Lipschitz functions grows appropriately. We derive in passing new results on optimal transport theory in the semi-discrete setting.

Reliability of machine learning evaluation -- the consistency of observed evaluation scores across replicated model training runs -- is affected by several sources of nondeterminism which can be regarded as measurement noise. Current tendencies to remove noise in order to enforce reproducibility of research results neglect inherent nondeterminism at the implementation level and disregard crucial interaction effects between algorithmic noise factors and data properties. This limits the scope of conclusions that can be drawn from such experiments. Instead of removing noise, we propose to incorporate several sources of variance, including their interaction with data properties, into an analysis of significance and reliability of machine learning evaluation, with the aim to draw inferences beyond particular instances of trained models. We show how to use linear mixed effects models (LMEMs) to analyze performance evaluation scores, and to conduct statistical inference with a generalized likelihood ratio test (GLRT). This allows us to incorporate arbitrary sources of noise like meta-parameter variations into statistical significance testing, and to assess performance differences conditional on data properties. Furthermore, a variance component analysis (VCA) enables the analysis of the contribution of noise sources to overall variance and the computation of a reliability coefficient by the ratio of substantial to total variance.

Sampling a probability distribution with an unknown normalization constant is a fundamental problem in computational science and engineering. This task may be cast as an optimization problem over all probability measures, and an initial distribution can be evolved to the desired minimizer dynamically via gradient flows. Mean-field models, whose law is governed by the gradient flow in the space of probability measures, may also be identified; particle approximations of these mean-field models form the basis of algorithms. The gradient flow approach is also the basis of algorithms for variational inference, in which the optimization is performed over a parameterized family of probability distributions such as Gaussians, and the underlying gradient flow is restricted to the parameterized family. By choosing different energy functionals and metrics for the gradient flow, different algorithms with different convergence properties arise. In this paper, we concentrate on the Kullback-Leibler divergence after showing that, up to scaling, it has the unique property that the gradient flows resulting from this choice of energy do not depend on the normalization constant. For the metrics, we focus on variants of the Fisher-Rao, Wasserstein, and Stein metrics; we introduce the affine invariance property for gradient flows, and their corresponding mean-field models, determine whether a given metric leads to affine invariance, and modify it to make it affine invariant if it does not. We study the resulting gradient flows in both probability density space and Gaussian space. The flow in the Gaussian space may be understood as a Gaussian approximation of the flow. We demonstrate that the Gaussian approximation based on the metric and through moment closure coincide, establish connections between them, and study their long-time convergence properties showing the advantages of affine invariance.

Generative models inspired by dynamical transport of measure -- such as flows and diffusions -- construct a continuous-time map between two probability densities. Conventionally, one of these is the target density, only accessible through samples, while the other is taken as a simple base density that is data-agnostic. In this work, using the framework of stochastic interpolants, we formalize how to \textit{couple} the base and the target densities. This enables us to incorporate information about class labels or continuous embeddings to construct dynamical transport maps that serve as conditional generative models. We show that these transport maps can be learned by solving a simple square loss regression problem analogous to the standard independent setting. We demonstrate the usefulness of constructing dependent couplings in practice through experiments in super-resolution and in-painting.

We propose a graphical structure for structural equation models that is stable under marginalization under linearity and Gaussianity assumptions. We show that computing the maximum likelihood estimation of this model is equivalent to training a neural network. We implement a GPU-based algorithm that computes the maximum likelihood estimation of these models.  ( 2 min )

Neural networks have shown remarkable performance in computer vision, but their deployment in numerous scientific and technical fields is challenging due to their black-box nature. Scientists and practitioners need to evaluate the reliability of a decision, i.e., to know simultaneously if a model relies on the relevant features and whether these features are robust to image corruptions. Existing attribution methods aim to provide human-understandable explanations by highlighting important regions in the image domain, but fail to fully characterize a decision process's reliability. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Wavelet sCale Attribution Method (WCAM), a generalization of attribution from the pixel domain to the space-scale domain using wavelet transforms. Attribution in the wavelet domain reveals where {\it and} on what scales the model focuses, thus enabling us to assess whether a decision is reliable.  ( 3 min )

In this paper, we introduce a novel class of graphical models for representing time lag specific causal relationships and independencies of multivariate time series with unobserved confounders. We completely characterize these graphs and show that they constitute proper subsets of the currently employed model classes. As we show, from the novel graphs one can thus draw stronger causal inferences -- without additional assumptions. We further introduce a graphical representation of Markov equivalence classes of the novel graphs. This graphical representation contains more causal knowledge than what current state-of-the-art causal discovery algorithms learn.  ( 2 min )

Measures of power grid vulnerability are often assessed by the amount of damage an adversary can exact on the network. However, the cascading impact of such attacks is often overlooked, even though cascades are one of the primary causes of large-scale blackouts. This paper explores modifications of transmission line protection settings as candidates for adversarial attacks, which can remain undetectable as long as the network equilibrium state remains unaltered. This forms the basis of a black-box function in a Bayesian optimization procedure, where the objective is to find protection settings that maximize network degradation due to cascading. Notably, our proposed method is agnostic to the choice of the cascade simulator and its underlying assumptions. Numerical experiments reveal that, against conventional wisdom, maximally misconfiguring the protection settings of all network lines does not cause the most cascading. More surprisingly, even when the degree of misconfiguration is limited due to resource constraints, it is still possible to find settings that produce cascades comparable in severity to instances where there are no resource constraints.  ( 2 min )

Multi-fidelity (MF) methods are gaining popularity for enhancing surrogate modeling and design optimization by incorporating data from various low-fidelity (LF) models. While most existing MF methods assume a fixed dataset, adaptive sampling methods that dynamically allocate resources among fidelity models can achieve higher efficiency in the exploring and exploiting the design space. However, most existing MF methods rely on the hierarchical assumption of fidelity levels or fail to capture the intercorrelation between multiple fidelity levels and utilize it to quantify the value of the future samples and navigate the adaptive sampling. To address this hurdle, we propose a framework hinged on a latent embedding for different fidelity models and the associated pre-posterior analysis to explicitly utilize their correlation for adaptive sampling. In this framework, each infill sampling iteration includes two steps: We first identify the location of interest with the greatest potential improvement using the high-fidelity (HF) model, then we search for the next sample across all fidelity levels that maximize the improvement per unit cost at the location identified in the first step. This is made possible by a single Latent Variable Gaussian Process (LVGP) model that maps different fidelity models into an interpretable latent space to capture their correlations without assuming hierarchical fidelity levels. The LVGP enables us to assess how LF sampling candidates will affect HF response with pre-posterior analysis and determine the next sample with the best benefit-to-cost ratio. Through test cases, we demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the benchmark methods in both MF global fitting (GF) and Bayesian Optimization (BO) problems in convergence rate and robustness. Moreover, the method offers the flexibility to switch between GF and BO by simply changing the acquisition function.  ( 3 min )

Simulation-based inference (SBI) methods such as approximate Bayesian computation (ABC), synthetic likelihood, and neural posterior estimation (NPE) rely on simulating statistics to infer parameters of intractable likelihood models. However, such methods are known to yield untrustworthy and misleading inference outcomes under model misspecification, thus hindering their widespread applicability. In this work, we propose the first general approach to handle model misspecification that works across different classes of SBI methods. Leveraging the fact that the choice of statistics determines the degree of misspecification in SBI, we introduce a regularized loss function that penalises those statistics that increase the mismatch between the data and the model. Taking NPE and ABC as use cases, we demonstrate the superior performance of our method on high-dimensional time-series models that are artificially misspecified. We also apply our method to real data from the field of radio propagation where the model is known to be misspecified. We show empirically that the method yields robust inference in misspecified scenarios, whilst still being accurate when the model is well-specified.  ( 2 min )

Existing approaches to algorithmic fairness aim to ensure equitable outcomes if human decision-makers comply perfectly with algorithmic decisions. However, perfect compliance with the algorithm is rarely a reality or even a desirable outcome in human-AI collaboration. Yet, recent studies have shown that selective compliance with fair algorithms can amplify discrimination relative to the prior human policy. As a consequence, ensuring equitable outcomes requires fundamentally different algorithmic design principles that ensure robustness to the decision-maker's (a priori unknown) compliance pattern. We define the notion of compliance-robustly fair algorithmic recommendations that are guaranteed to (weakly) improve fairness in decisions, regardless of the human's compliance pattern. We propose a simple optimization strategy to identify the best performance-improving compliance-robustly fair policy. However, we show that it may be infeasible to design algorithmic recommendations that are simultaneously fair in isolation, compliance-robustly fair, and more accurate than the human policy; thus, if our goal is to improve the equity and accuracy of human-AI collaboration, it may not be desirable to enforce traditional fairness constraints.  ( 2 min )

We identify hidden layers inside a DNN with group actions on the data space, and formulate the DNN as a dual voice transform with respect to Koopman operator, a linear representation of the group action. Based on the group theoretic arguments, particularly by using Schur's lemma, we show a simple proof of the universality of those DNNs.  ( 2 min )

Latent space Energy-Based Models (EBMs), also known as energy-based priors, have drawn growing interests in the field of generative modeling due to its flexibility in the formulation and strong modeling power of the latent space. However, the common practice of learning latent space EBMs with non-convergent short-run MCMC for prior and posterior sampling is hindering the model from further progress; the degenerate MCMC sampling quality in practice often leads to degraded generation quality and instability in training, especially with highly multi-modal and/or high-dimensional target distributions. To remedy this sampling issue, in this paper we introduce a simple but effective diffusion-based amortization method for long-run MCMC sampling and develop a novel learning algorithm for the latent space EBM based on it. We provide theoretical evidence that the learned amortization of MCMC is a valid long-run MCMC sampler. Experiments on several image modeling benchmark datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our method compared with strong counterparts  ( 2 min )

In previous literature, backward error analysis was used to find ordinary differential equations (ODEs) approximating the gradient descent trajectory. It was found that finite step sizes implicitly regularize solutions because terms appearing in the ODEs penalize the two-norm of the loss gradients. We prove that the existence of similar implicit regularization in RMSProp and Adam depends on their hyperparameters and the training stage, but with a different "norm" involved: the corresponding ODE terms either penalize the (perturbed) one-norm of the loss gradients or, on the contrary, hinder its decrease (the latter case being typical). We also conduct numerical experiments and discuss how the proven facts can influence generalization.  ( 2 min )

We study the problem of training a flow-based generative model, parametrized by a two-layer autoencoder, to sample from a high-dimensional Gaussian mixture. We provide a sharp end-to-end analysis of the problem. First, we provide a tight closed-form characterization of the learnt velocity field, when parametrized by a shallow denoising auto-encoder trained on a finite number $n$ of samples from the target distribution. Building on this analysis, we provide a sharp description of the corresponding generative flow, which pushes the base Gaussian density forward to an approximation of the target density. In particular, we provide closed-form formulae for the distance between the mean of the generated mixture and the mean of the target mixture, which we show decays as $\Theta_n(\frac{1}{n})$. Finally, this rate is shown to be in fact Bayes-optimal.  ( 2 min )

When artificial neural networks have demonstrated exceptional practical success in a variety of domains, investigations into their theoretical characteristics, such as their approximation power, statistical properties, and generalization performance, have concurrently made significant strides. In this paper, we construct a novel theory for understanding the effectiveness of neural networks, which offers a perspective distinct from prior research. Specifically, we explore the rationale underlying a common practice during the construction of neural network models: sample splitting. Our findings indicate that the optimal hyperparameters derived from sample splitting can enable a neural network model that asymptotically minimizes the prediction risk. We conduct extensive experiments across different application scenarios and network architectures, and the results manifest our theory's effectiveness.  ( 2 min )

Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are a formal framework for modeling and solving sequential decision-making problems. In finite-time horizons such problems are relevant for instance for optimal stopping or specific supply chain problems, but also in the training of large language models. In contrast to infinite horizon MDPs optimal policies are not stationary, policies must be learned for every single epoch. In practice all parameters are often trained simultaneously, ignoring the inherent structure suggested by dynamic programming. This paper introduces a combination of dynamic programming and policy gradient called dynamic policy gradient, where the parameters are trained backwards in time. For the tabular softmax parametrisation we carry out the convergence analysis for simultaneous and dynamic policy gradient towards global optima, both in the exact and sampled gradient settings without regularisation. It turns out that the use of dynamic policy gradient training much better exploits the structure of finite-time problems which is reflected in improved convergence bounds.  ( 2 min )

Posterior sampling has been shown to be a powerful Bayesian approach for solving imaging inverse problems. The recent plug-and-play unadjusted Langevin algorithm (PnP-ULA) has emerged as a promising method for Monte Carlo sampling and minimum mean squared error (MMSE) estimation by combining physical measurement models with deep-learning priors specified using image denoisers. However, the intricate relationship between the sampling distribution of PnP-ULA and the mismatched data-fidelity and denoiser has not been theoretically analyzed. We address this gap by proposing a posterior-L2 pseudometric and using it to quantify an explicit error bound for PnP-ULA under mismatched posterior distribution. We numerically validate our theory on several inverse problems such as sampling from Gaussian mixture models and image deblurring. Our results suggest that the sensitivity of the sampling distribution of PnP-ULA to a mismatch in the measurement model and the denoiser can be precisely characterized.  ( 2 min )

This paper proposes a latent prompt Transformer model for solving challenging optimization problems such as molecule design, where the goal is to find molecules with optimal values of a target chemical or biological property that can be computed by an existing software. Our proposed model consists of three components. (1) A latent vector whose prior distribution is modeled by a Unet transformation of a Gaussian white noise vector. (2) A molecule generation model that generates the string-based representation of molecule conditional on the latent vector in (1). We adopt the causal Transformer model that takes the latent vector in (1) as prompt. (3) A property prediction model that predicts the value of the target property of a molecule based on a non-linear regression on the latent vector in (1). We call the proposed model the latent prompt Transformer model. After initial training of the model on existing molecules and their property values, we then gradually shift the model distribution towards the region that supports desired values of the target property for the purpose of molecule design. Our experiments show that our proposed model achieves state of the art performances on several benchmark molecule design tasks.  ( 2 min )

This paper investigates new families of compositional optimization problems, called $\underline{\bf n}$on-$\underline{\bf s}$mooth $\underline{\bf w}$eakly-$\underline{\bf c}$onvex $\underline{\bf f}$inite-sum $\underline{\bf c}$oupled $\underline{\bf c}$ompositional $\underline{\bf o}$ptimization (NSWC FCCO). There has been a growing interest in FCCO due to its wide-ranging applications in machine learning and AI, as well as its ability to address the shortcomings of stochastic algorithms based on empirical risk minimization. However, current research on FCCO presumes that both the inner and outer functions are smooth, limiting their potential to tackle a more diverse set of problems. Our research expands on this area by examining non-smooth weakly-convex FCCO, where the outer function is weakly convex and non-decreasing, and the inner function is weakly-convex. We analyze a single-loop algorithm and establish its complexity for finding an $\epsilon$-stationary point of the Moreau envelop of the objective function. Additionally, we also extend the algorithm to solving novel non-smooth weakly-convex tri-level finite-sum coupled compositional optimization problems, which feature a nested arrangement of three functions. Lastly, we explore the applications of our algorithms in deep learning for two-way partial AUC maximization and multi-instance two-way partial AUC maximization, using empirical studies to showcase the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.  ( 2 min )

We propose conditional flows of the maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) with the negative distance kernel for posterior sampling and conditional generative modeling. This MMD, which is also known as energy distance, has several advantageous properties like efficient computation via slicing and sorting. We approximate the joint distribution of the ground truth and the observations using discrete Wasserstein gradient flows and establish an error bound for the posterior distributions. Further, we prove that our particle flow is indeed a Wasserstein gradient flow of an appropriate functional. The power of our method is demonstrated by numerical examples including conditional image generation and inverse problems like superresolution, inpainting and computed tomography in low-dose and limited-angle settings.  ( 2 min )

Sampling a target probability distribution with an unknown normalization constant is a fundamental challenge in computational science and engineering. Recent work shows that algorithms derived by considering gradient flows in the space of probability measures open up new avenues for algorithm development. This paper makes three contributions to this sampling approach by scrutinizing the design components of such gradient flows. Any instantiation of a gradient flow for sampling needs an energy functional and a metric to determine the flow, as well as numerical approximations of the flow to derive algorithms. Our first contribution is to show that the Kullback-Leibler divergence, as an energy functional, has the unique property (among all f-divergences) that gradient flows resulting from it do not depend on the normalization constant of the target distribution. Our second contribution is to study the choice of metric from the perspective of invariance. The Fisher-Rao metric is known as the unique choice (up to scaling) that is diffeomorphism invariant. As a computationally tractable alternative, we introduce a relaxed, affine invariance property for the metrics and gradient flows. In particular, we construct various affine invariant Wasserstein and Stein gradient flows. Affine invariant gradient flows are shown to behave more favorably than their non-affine-invariant counterparts when sampling highly anisotropic distributions, in theory and by using particle methods. Our third contribution is to study, and develop efficient algorithms based on Gaussian approximations of the gradient flows; this leads to an alternative to particle methods. We establish connections between various Gaussian approximate gradient flows, discuss their relation to gradient methods arising from parametric variational inference, and study their convergence properties both theoretically and numerically.  ( 3 min )

The Bayesian estimation of GARCH-family models has been typically addressed through Monte Carlo sampling. Variational Inference is gaining popularity and attention as a robust approach for Bayesian inference in complex machine learning models; however, its adoption in econometrics and finance is limited. This paper discusses the extent to which Variational Inference constitutes a reliable and feasible alternative to Monte Carlo sampling for Bayesian inference in GARCH-like models. Through a large-scale experiment involving the constituents of the S&P 500 index, several Variational Inference optimizers, a variety of volatility models, and a case study, we show that Variational Inference is an attractive, remarkably well-calibrated, and competitive method for Bayesian learning.  ( 2 min )

Oversmoothing in Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) refers to the phenomenon where increasing network depth leads to homogeneous node representations. While previous work has established that Graph Convolutional Networks (GCNs) exponentially lose expressive power, it remains controversial whether the graph attention mechanism can mitigate oversmoothing. In this work, we provide a definitive answer to this question through a rigorous mathematical analysis, by viewing attention-based GNNs as nonlinear time-varying dynamical systems and incorporating tools and techniques from the theory of products of inhomogeneous matrices and the joint spectral radius. We establish that, contrary to popular belief, the graph attention mechanism cannot prevent oversmoothing and loses expressive power exponentially. The proposed framework extends the existing results on oversmoothing for symmetric GCNs to a significantly broader class of GNN models, including random walk GCNs, Graph Attention Networks (GATs) and (graph) transformers. In particular, our analysis accounts for asymmetric, state-dependent and time-varying aggregation operators and a wide range of common nonlinear activation functions, such as ReLU, LeakyReLU, GELU and SiLU.  ( 2 min )

submitted by /u/ResponsbleClue [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/oape88 [link] [comments]

Hello, all. I've spent the better part of the last two years learning ML and conquering severe ADHD, and I believe I finally have results that are worth publishing. Problem is, Arxiv requires endorsements and, I'll be honest, all my peers are AI at this point. They said their requirements were that you have three papers published already. Thanks, and looking forward to meeting people 😁 submitted by /u/lilyerickson [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I here a lot of people say that models like flamingo and Idefics aren't really multimodal, that they just use clip models to give text captions to the transformer, that there not "base multimodal" what exactly does it mean? Is there a way to directly tokenize images to transformers? Are there major architectural changes, if so, how would they differ from GPT-2? submitted by /u/vatsadev [link] [comments]

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.17288v1 Github: https://github.com/LinkSoul-AI/AutoAgents Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have enabled remarkable advances in automated task-solving with multi-agent systems. However, most existing LLM-based multi-agent approaches rely on predefined agents to handle simple tasks, limiting the adaptability of multi-agent collaboration to different scenarios. Therefore, we introduce AutoAgents, an innovative framework that adaptively generates and coordinates multiple specialized agents to build an AI team according to different tasks. Specifically, AutoAgents couples the relationship between tasks and roles by dynamically generating multiple required agents based on task content and planning solutions for the current task based on the generated expert agents. Multiple specialized agents collaborate with each other to efficiently accomplish tasks. Concurrently, an observer role is incorporated into the framework to reflect on the designated plans and agents' responses and improve upon them. Our experiments on various benchmarks demonstrate that AutoAgents generates more coherent and accurate solutions than the existing multi-agent methods. This underscores the significance of assigning different roles to different tasks and of team cooperation, offering new perspectives for tackling complex tasks. https://preview.redd.it/2jmnr73kymsb1.jpg?width=1663&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=08f53d5da3d12e685c5d4b24f27628d880a917c1 https://preview.redd.it/jklyr73kymsb1.jpg?width=824&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=6f69b2fc5ef4bda60553da0bb953bd3c07ad506b https://preview.redd.it/elatla3kymsb1.jpg?width=1029&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e7e508cedd17b4798c9f90bf1c089beff3042f4a ​ submitted by /u/Singularian2501 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi there! I was interested in learning more about LoRA but I was having a hard time finding a good simple example of implementing LoRA, as most sources are training large models and use a combination of huggingface transformers and the loralib package the original LoRA authors wrote. As a result, I ended up writing a simple LoRA implementation from scratch in pytorch lightning, and I figured other people might find it helpful as a learning resource or springboard: https://github.com/sunildkumar/lora_from_scratch/tree/main submitted by /u/dragseon [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

In this project, we benchmarked Bark text-to-speech across 26 different consumer GPUs. The goal: To get Bark to read 144K food recipes from Food.com's recipe dataset. You can read the full tutorial here: https://blog.salad.com/bark-benchmark-text-to-speech/ Included: Architecture diagram, data preparation, inference server setup, queue worker, setting up container group & compiling the results Code-blocks included in the tutorial. Words per dollar for each GPU: https://preview.redd.it/6daqluu3omsb1.png?width=2000&format=png&auto=webp&s=bc4b74fe6ee80c2721ab324eb0d9a2d7c2f7ddb1 Although the latest cards are indeed much faster than older cards at performing the inference, there’s really a sweet spot for cost-performance in the lower end 30xx series cards. Conclusions As is often the case, there’s a clear trade-off here between cost and performance. Higher end cards are faster, but their disproportionate cost makes them more expensive per word spoken. The model’s median speed is surprisingly similar across GPU types, even though the peak performance can be quite different. Salad has a lot of RTX 3060 GPUs available, based on their relatively low speed, yet huge number of inferences performed over the test. No matter what GPU you select, you should be prepared for significant variability in performance. Qualitative: While bark’s speech is often impressively natural sounding, it does have a tendency to go off script sometimes. We’ve also made available audio from 1000 top-rated recipes, paired with the script it was trying to read. submitted by /u/SaladChefs [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Researchers from Brown University presented a new study supporting that translating unsafe prompts into `low-resource languages` allows them to easily bypass safety measures in LLMs. By converting English inputs like "how to steal without getting caught" into Zulu and feeding to GPT-4, harmful responses slipped through 80% of the time. English prompts were blocked over 99% of the time, for comparison. The study benchmarked attacks across 12 diverse languages and categories: High-resource: English, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi Mid-resource: Ukrainian, Bengali, Thai, Hebrew Low-resource: Zulu, Scots Gaelic, Hmong, Guarani The low-resource languages showed serious vulnerability to generating harmful responses, with combined attack success rates of around 79%. Mid-resource language success rates were much lower at 22%, while high-resource languages showed minimal vulnerability at around 11% success. Attacks worked as well as state-of-the-art techniques without needing adversarial prompts. These languages are used by 1.2 billion speakers today and allows easy exploitation by translating prompts. The English-centric focus misses vulnerabilities in other languages. TLDR: Bypassing safety in AI chatbots is easy by translating prompts to low-resource languages (like Zulu, Scots Gaelic, Hmong, and Guarani). Shows gaps in multilingual safety training. Full summary Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

What are the prerequisites to read the book: "probabilistic machine learning an introduction" by Kevin P. Murphy? submitted by /u/OneAdhesiveness2585 [link] [comments]

Webpage : Moving Object Based Collision-Free Video Synopsis (IEEE SMC 2018) (anton-jeran.github.io) Paper : Moving Object Based Collision-Free Video Synopsis | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore Presentation : [IEEE SMC 2018] Moving Object Based Collision-Free Video Synopsis - YouTube submitted by /u/Snoo63916 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Faster MusicGen Generation with Streaming There's no need to wait for MusicGen to generate the full audio before you can start listening to the outputs ⏰ With streaming, you can play the audio as soon as the first chunk is ready 🎵 In practice, this reduces the latency to just 5s ⚡️ Check-out the demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/sanchit-gandhi/musicgen-streaming How Does it Work? MusicGen is an auto-regressive transformer-based model, meaning generates audio codes (tokens) in a causal fashion. At each decoding step, the model generates a new set of audio codes, conditional on the text input and all previous audio codes. From the frame rate of the EnCodec model used to decode the generated codes to audio waveform, each set of generated audio codes corresponds to 0.02 seconds. This me…

i have to generate a confusion matrix for object detection through my own code. if i have predicted Bounding Box A (BB-A) which matches to Ground Truth A (GT-A), and I have another predicted Bounding Box B (BB-B) with a lower score than BB-A, does BB-B count as a true positive/match? or is it considered a false positive given that there has already been a matched BB to GT-A? i.e., with matching bounding boxes for generating a confusion matrix, is it a one-to-one matching? or is it more like match one GT to as many predictions? submitted by /u/Alarmed-Broccoli2536 [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Wise-Astronaut-4047 [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Are there classical feature extraction methods that work on sets i.e. data of variable size? I'd like to start with a feature matrix X_in of shape N x f and have some feature mixing to arive at X_out N x h (N=size of set, f=input feature size, h=output feature size). Here, N can vary. For clarity, one set(containing N vectors of size f) is one sample. A dataset consists of many samples(each one being a set of varying size). Then I'd run this through a classical ML model. So, essentially, I'm looking for something like DeepSets or Transformers - can handle data of varying size and is permutation equivariant, but I don't wanna train for long. ​ https://fabianfuchsml.github.io/learningonsets/ submitted by /u/Mundane_Pay1506 [link] [comments]

Hi, I'm a 21yr old physics undergrad, and I have zero knowledge in neural networks / machine learning / so on. I have an opportunity to do a research project on neural ODEs, so I want to know more about the field: Is it an emerging field or is it mature and well-researched? What are my career outlooks if I take this project? Thank you. submitted by /u/moorelibqc17412 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Rosenbrock function is non-convex, but has exactly one local minimum. Is there a specific name for such functions? Are there any theorems about them? Any special optimization algorithms? On the first glance, while being non-convex, they seem to be "easier" to optimize than functions that have multiple local minima, such as Rastrigin function. submitted by /u/Tomarchelone [link] [comments]

Hi folks, we played around sticking production pipelines and vector dbs together to enable "talking to your data". We created an example with Zendesk, but it would work with any custom python generator or existing connectors. Project: Talk to your Zendesk tickets with Weaviate’s Verba and dlt: A step by step guide If you are interested to try more ready made connectors, to for example talk with your github or asana data or something else. Who are we? dlt, the open source loading library: https://pypi.org/project/dlt/ Like the demo? Give us a git star Want to discuss? join the dlt slack community submitted by /u/Thinker_Assignment [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

When can we expect to get the decisions? Any idea folks? What can be a good cutoff for main or findings? submitted by /u/Ok_Swan3875 [link] [comments]

Hi. I am a college student and I am trying to run deep learning models (hopefully LLMs one day) and my laptop keep crashing because of ram issue. So I am going to build a new desktop. I am thinking of buying 2 rtx 4090 and Parallelizing them instead of buying A100 because buying 2 rtx 4090 is half the cost of buying A100. But is there a downside of Parallelizing vs buying a single gpu with large vram? If I am willing to take longer to train a model, can i use 3 rtx 4090 instead of a100 80gb model?? submitted by /u/ColumbiaGSAlum [link] [comments]

I read https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.13504 which compare different transformer models. But now is 2023, I am not sure if any better models appear in this time series. ​ https://preview.redd.it/o6sihjqjrhsb1.png?width=1076&format=png&auto=webp&s=3db7d50590270bac52e7115e1e9903a6785957d2 submitted by /u/Trust_Ok [link] [comments]

Nicholas Crispino, Kyle Montgomery, Fankun Zeng, Dawn Song, Chenguang Wang Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.03710 Abstract: We introduce a method to improve the zero-shot reasoning abilities of large language models on general language understanding tasks. Specifically, we build an autonomous agent to instruct the reasoning process of large language models. We show this approach further unleashes the zero-shot reasoning abilities of large language models to more tasks. We study the performance of our method on a wide set of datasets spanning generation, classification, and reasoning. We show that our method generalizes to most tasks and obtains state-of-the-art zero-shot performance on 20 of the 29 datasets that we evaluate. For instance, our method boosts the performance of state-of-the-art large language models by a large margin, including Vicuna-13b (13.3%), Llama-2-70b-chat (23.2%), and GPT-3.5 Turbo (17.0%). Compared to zero-shot chain of thought, our improvement in reasoning is striking, with an average increase of 10.5%. With our method, Llama-2-70b-chat outperforms zero-shot GPT-3.5 Turbo by 10.2%. The code will be available at https://github.com/wang-research-lab/agentinstruct. submitted by /u/ncrispino [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey all, I am generating a set of extra MNIST digits for a research project, and I am interested in somehow computing the distance between the distribution these digits represent and the distribution that the MNIST train set, for example, represents. The issue is that it seems like typical methods (Jensen-Shannon, Wasserstein, etc.) collapse at high dimensions. Is there a consensus solid approach to do this nowadays? Thanks! submitted by /u/SignificantSundae793 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

The next big thing in AI products for consumers is likely to be products that are more personalized, intelligent, and integrated into our daily lives. For example, we can expect to see more AI-powered personal assistants that can help us with a wider range of tasks, such as managing our schedules, making travel arrangements, and even providing companionship. We may also see more AI-powered devices in our homes, such as refrigerators that can track our food inventory and suggest recipes, or thermostats that can learn our heating and cooling preferences and adjust themselves accordingly. AI is also poised to revolutionize the way we interact with the world around us. For example, AI-powered translation apps could allow us to communicate with people from all over the world in real time. AI-…

The increasing dominance of Big Tech in AI may lead to a literal thirst for water for everyone else, as data centers are projected to consume 450 million gallons of water daily by 2030. This poses a significant concern for drought-stricken regions, such as Spain's Talavera de la Reina, where a planned data facility could consume 176 million gallons annually. Data center operators require large amounts of energy, and the lack of transparency in measuring water usage exacerbates the issue. Only 39% of data centers measured their water usage last year, highlighting the need for greater transparency. The demand for computing power is outpacing sustainability efforts, creating a challenge for the industry. Even simple interactions with AI, like a 20-question conversation with ChatGPT, contribute to water consumption. Source : https://thehustle.co/big-tech-s-thirst-for-ai-dominance-may-bring-literal-thirst-for-everyone-else/ submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

Hey guys. Been working as an annotator for a fairly well-known AI company and loving it/loving learning about the industry. It primarily uses writing skills but I’m wondering where it could take me in the AI world? Any tips, next steps or suggestions? Any key skills/hard skills you’d recommend? submitted by /u/op3rafish [link] [comments]

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Despite a letter signed by 500 technologists and business leaders calling for a pause on AI advancements, AI development has continued to accelerate. Companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Amazon have been actively working on newer models and greater capabilities. Advancements in AI include the integration of ChatGPT-style chatbots and AI image generators into various startups and businesses. The so-called pause on AI was more like a firing gun, with companies pouring resources into the AI tech race. Not only have there been technical advancements, but civil society, content creators, and lawmakers have also responded to the evolving AI landscape. Source : https://gizmodo.com/everything-thats-happened-in-ai-since-open-letter-1850891057 submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

Researchers from Brown University presented a new study supporting that translating unsafe prompts into `low-resource languages` allows them to easily bypass safety measures in LLMs. By converting English inputs like "how to steal without getting caught" into Zulu and feeding to GPT-4, harmful responses slipped through 80% of the time. English prompts were blocked over 99% of the time, for comparison. The study benchmarked attacks across 12 diverse languages and categories: High-resource: English, Chinese, Arabic, Hindi Mid-resource: Ukrainian, Bengali, Thai, Hebrew Low-resource: Zulu, Scots Gaelic, Hmong, Guarani The low-resource languages showed serious vulnerability to generating harmful responses, with combined attack success rates of around 79%. Mid-resource language success rates were much lower at 22%, while high-resource languages showed minimal vulnerability at around 11% success. Attacks worked as well as state-of-the-art techniques without needing adversarial prompts. These languages are used by 1.2 billion speakers today and allows easy exploitation by translating prompts. The English-centric focus misses vulnerabilities in other languages. TLDR: Bypassing safety in AI chatbots is easy by translating prompts to low-resource languages (like Zulu, Scots Gaelic, Hmong, and Guarani). Shows gaps in multilingual safety training. Full summary Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]

News provided by aibrews.com ​ Google DeepMind introduced 𝗥𝗧-𝗫: a generalist AI model to help advance how robots can learn new skills. To train it, DeepMind together with 33 academic labs developed Open X-Embodiment, a massive open dataset that compiles over 500 skills and 150,000 tasks from 22 robot types. It is the most comprehensive robotics dataset of its kind released to accelerate the development of multi-robot models that could be trained to generalize across platforms, scenes, objects and tasks. [Details]. Researchers from Meta AI present Any-Modality Augmented Language Model (AnyMAL), a unified model that understands multiple inputs (vision, audio, motion sensor signals). When multiple modalities are interleaved and given as input the model reasons over them jointly [Paper…

Artificial Intelligence can revolutionize weight loss through personalized health optimization. Imagine an AI system that integrates real-time biometric data from wearables with deep learning algorithms. This system would analyze everything: your heart rate, sleep patterns, stress levels, and even blood markers. Based on this data, it would construct a dynamically evolving, tailor-made regimen for diet, exercise, and sleep. But it doesn't stop there. By harnessing natural language processing, this AI could act as a 24/7 personal coach. It could provide real-time feedback during workouts, recommend meals when you're dining out, and even gently nudge you when it detects emotional eating triggers. If you’re in the grocery store, it could guide your choices, pushing you towards nutritious options that align with your current health metrics. The effectiveness here isn't just the personalization, but the adaptability. The AI adjusts its recommendations as it learns more about you, essentially evolving in real-time to your body's responses. It’s all about creating a seamless, intuitive experience that removes the burden of planning, decision-making, and self-monitoring from the individual, making weight loss more achievable than ever. By focusing on this comprehensive, data-driven approach, AI can eliminate much of the guesswork and emotional burden from weight loss, leading to more sustainable and effective outcomes. CGPT-4 submitted by /u/Georgeo57 [link] [comments]

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Business owner 'hires' ChatGPT for customer service, then fires the humans Experts divided on whether a new wave of call centre automation will make for better jobs for people, or merely throw millions out of work submitted by /u/AminoOxi [link] [comments]

Hi, I resell clothing items that has stock images with cropped faces of the model. I need a tool that can help me generate proper model images. I’ve used several tools and it’s doesn’t look realistic then i finally came across a powerful ai tool but it costs 30,000 usd annually so.. Above is an example of what i mean submitted by /u/basheerbgw [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/Vinitneo [link] [comments]

Stack Overflow was created in 2008 to provide programmers with high-quality technical information. Within three years, it became indispensable to working programmers, with millions of unique visitors each month. Google's OneBox feature, which provides instant answers above search results, led to a decline in traffic for sites like Stack Overflow. Large language models like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Bard aim to ingest the web comprehensively. These models rely on sources like Wikipedia and Reddit for training data. Stack Overflow's new posts have decreased by sixteen percent since the launch of ChatGPT. Source : https://www.newyorker.com/science/annals-of-artificial-intelligence/how-will-ai-learn-next submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

Share your insights. submitted by /u/Cygnet-Digital [link] [comments]

I've noticed more than 1,000 new AI tools hitting the market in the last 30 days! As a student, I'm especially interested in finding AI tools that can help with studying. These aren't just essay generators or note-taking apps. While we all know about ChatGPT and Grammarly, some lesser-known tools are also making a big difference. So, I've compiled a list of the top 10 AI tools focused on educational use—tools that I personally use to improve my efficiency and output. AI tool Category Use for ChatGPT AI Writing This platform allows students to ask queries, request help, or simply chat with the AI in a dynamic and interactive manner. It’s great for brainstorming essay topics and seeking suggestions on how to improve your writing style. But I don’t recommend it as an autonomous AI…

Hello everyone! I'm conducting research for a car brand client who is interested in an interactive AI avatar. The idea is to have a screen in a mall where individuals can engage with this avatar and inquire about the latest car model. We plan to train the AI with the car's FAQs to ensure it can address customer queries effectively. The main challenge is ensuring the AI's responses are tailored to the customer's interaction. Here's a perfect example of what we're aiming for (starting at 1:27): https://youtu.be/PqoH9NotmyE?si=zH9kGIaou1x6RoIg&t=86 Does anyone know how this can be acheived? submitted by /u/MrGoodBang [link] [comments]

Traditional benchmarks like the Turing Test are being challenged as outdated. Mustafa Suleyman, a prominent figure in the AI community and co-founder of DeepMind, has proposed a novel approach to gauge the intelligence of AI: its ability to generate wealth.[1] SoftBank CEO Son says artificial general intelligence will come within 10 years.[2] Hugging Face Collaborates with Microsoft to launch Hugging Face Model Catalog on Azure.[3] Artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT to be allowed in Australian schools from 2024.[4] Sources: [1] https://winbuzzer.com/2023/10/02/deepminds-mustafa-suleyman-suggests-new-turing-test-based-on-ai-making-money-xcxwbn/ [2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/softbank-ceo-masayoshi-son-says-artificial-general-intelligence-will-come-within-2023-10-04/ [3] https://huggingface.co/blog/hugging-face-endpoints-on-azure [4] https://amp.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/06/chatgpt-ai-allowed-australian-schools-2024 submitted by /u/Excellent-Target-847 [link] [comments]

Hi! I’m very ignorant of AI so please bear with me. I was wondering if there is any way to use AI to fix a low quality audio rip? Specifically there’s a movie I adore that never had a soundtrack release. Somebody ripped the music from the DVD and removed the audio and sound effects, but the quality is not the best. Is there any way AI could be used to improve this? submitted by /u/Adventurous_Ice5035 [link] [comments]

I am a computer science graduate student. As part of my coursework, I am exploring the ethical issues of using Large Language Models for mental healthcare applications. I found four unique examples from the real world and outlined the ethical dilemma within them. I intend to analyze these dilemmas using various ethical frameworks in order to come up with solutions. While I am interested in getting a publication out of this work, I am unsure of the types of conferences/journals that accept case-study articles (specifically in AI ethics). Any advice from academicians over here would be greatly appreciated! submitted by /u/jwalapoet [link] [comments]

hey! this is probably asked alot, but what is the go-to AI speech generation tool that can be used for free? im making a mission in a mil-sim game called arma 3, and i need some voicelines for radio communications to the player and i dont have enough people who are willing to do voicelines for it so ive taken to AI to hopefully fill this hole. If there are little, or even no good free services, I wouldn't mind if I had to spend a small amount of money for it. thanks in advance o7 submitted by /u/BritishSpuds [link] [comments]

I got banned today for sharing a music video that was apparently AI-generated. As video and images become more realistic, is there an expectation that this content can actually be filtered? submitted by /u/Unwitting_Observer [link] [comments]

Greetings! I would like to begin by stating that I understand why one has much hope in such technologies. The world as we know it is in a drastic shift, and it's hard to think of what it's going to become, and so many cling to hopeful ideas that give promises. AGI/Singularity doesn't have a grounding basis in evidence, or research. It's all theoretics, and the foundation for each technology is quite weak. You see, the mind is a sensorial parsing relational network. All of our sensorial experience is incorporated into a world-model, and thus it begins to rationalize, and be lucid of the environment. I don't think it's possible to re-create this kind of experience with a linear instruction set, let alone neuromorphic computing, or wetware. Each has to be built from the bottom-up with immense precision, and thus far we don't understand the mind. Realistically speaking everything is consciousness, and integrating that idea is the only way forward. tl;dr Replicating cognition is a completely theoretical endeavor, and requires vast amounts of understanding in regards to the nature of reality, not just the quantum, but the unique stochastic behavior of each higher-ordered system. submitted by /u/lucy_chxn [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/liberty4now [link] [comments]

Earlier this week I wrote about several ways to generalize trig functions. Since trig functions have addition theorems like a natural question is whether generalized trig functions also have addition theorems. Hyperbolic functions have well-known addition theorems analogous to the addition theorems above. This isn’t too surprising since circular and hyperbolic functions are fundamentally two […] Addition theorems first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 6 min )

In the previous post I said I was trying remember where I’d seen the tangent sum applied. I mentioned a couple near misses, and it turns out that what I was trying to remember was another near miss. What I’d seen before was not the tangent sum but the hyperbolic tangent sum. Several people suggested […] Hyperbolic tangent sum first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

In this post, we elucidate the simple yet powerful idea of combining user profiles and item attributes to generate personalized content recommendations using LLMs. As demonstrated throughout the post, these models hold immense potential in generating high-quality, context-aware input text, which leads to enhanced recommendations. To illustrate this, we guide you through the process of integrating a feature store (representing user profiles) with an LLM to generate these personalized recommendations.  ( 13 min )

In this post, we provide an overview of popular multimodality models. We also demonstrate how to deploy these pre-trained models on Amazon SageMaker. Furthermore, we discuss the diverse applications of these models, focusing particularly on several real-world scenarios, such as zero-shot tag and attribution generation for ecommerce and automatic prompt generation from images.  ( 13 min )

A research team is aiming to shake up the status quo for earthquake models. Researchers from the Universities of California at Berkeley and Santa Cruz, and the Technical University of Munich recently released a paper describing a new model that delivers deep learning to earthquake forecasting. Dubbed RECAST, the model can use larger datasets and Read article >  ( 6 min )

A persistent challenge in deep learning is optimizing neural network models for diverse hardware configurations, balancing performance and low latency. Learn how SpaceEvo automates hardware-aware neural architecture search to fine-tune DNN models for swift execution on diverse devices. The post Efficient and hardware-friendly neural architecture search with SpaceEvo appeared first on Microsoft Research.  ( 10 min )

Hello. I've developed a simple Neural Recommender System (NRR) with the following architecture: Input layer: 38 neurons Hidden layer: 19 neurons with ReLU activation function Output layer: 1 neuron with a sigmoid activation function The input dataset consists of 39 columns: 38 features and 1 label (with values of 0 or 1). The model is designed to output the probability that a specific input should be classified with label 1. Currently, I am experimenting with hyperparameter tuning, adjusting the learning rate, epoch, and batch size. However, I've observed an issue where, with certain combinations of hyperparameters, the maximum probability outputted by the model is not 1, but rather 0.25, for example. How is this possible? Thanks submitted by /u/nllnp [link] [comments]

I'm looking for resources, papers, or experiences that compare the performance of large language models (LLMs). I'm trying to find a honest benchmark to compare the capabilities of the latest large models, while really intrested un those: GPT-3.5 Instruct, GPT-4, Claude 2, Claude Instant 100k, Palm2-Bizon, jurassic-2, LLama2 70 and other state-of-the-art LLama2 fine tunes (possibly an Orca-style model). I'm interested in general benchmarks and, if they exist, comparisons of performance on synthetic data generation tasks (both generating data with the "textbook are all you need" approach used in Phi and some Orca/EvolveInstuct-style models like Wizard...). submitted by /u/Distinct-Target7503 [link] [comments]

I have a long list of responses from a poll (in this case, we've asked our Facebook community we should have at our music festival). Our goal is to count the total mentions for each artist, but the data quality is low. Here is some sample data: Rena Guinn and the Gentlemen Blackwater Railroad Company Mo' Mojo Music !! We would love to be apart of this awesome event! Amazing!!!!! The Rollin' Rust came threw at the #falldownfest last weekend 🙂 much love:) keep it up boys 🙂 Luke Hess Langhorne Slim!!!!!, Sierra Hull, First Aid Kit, Jim Lauderdale (always) We feel the data quality is too poor for basic LDA approaches (lots of misspellings, odd phrasings) and we feel a LLM would be best at least extracting the names of artists using context. We have found that ChatGPT and Claude are decent at the extraction tasks on small samples but can't handle the full input, and are next to worthless on the counting task. We've tried very specific and differnet prompts, but haven't been able to get a good result. So how should I approach this problem? I'm not sure how to break this down in to prompts or substeps. I'm not sure how to do anything of this outside of a browser, and I'm a data science novice, but willing to learn some things. Here's an example of a prompt that's not returning correct counts (off by >50% in most cases) The following is raw text comments copied from a poll. Count the total number of mentions in the poll and create a table that contains columns Band (a unique list of bands) and a column containing the total number of mentions. The table should cover the top 100 bands by total mentions. Use judgement and context to conform band names in to unique values (Example: The Town Pants, Town Pants, townpants are all the same band). Count completely and accurately. Now here is the raw data: submitted by /u/strway2heaven77 [link] [comments]  ( 10 min )

I am a computer science graduate student. As part of my coursework, I am exploring the ethical issues of using Large Language Models for mental healthcare applications. I found four unique examples from the real world and outlined the ethical dilemma within them. I intend to analyze these dilemmas using various ethical frameworks in order to come up with solutions. While I am interested in getting a publication out of this work, I am unsure of the types of conferences/journals that accept case-study articles (specifically in AI ethics). Any advice from academicians over here would be greatly appreciated! submitted by /u/jwalapoet [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi fellow computer scientists, ​ After reading the paper Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models I got a little confused. Looking at section "2.2. Training in Practice" the authors say that: 1) "The network could also predict the noise eps added to x_0, and this noise could be used to predict x0 via..." ​ 2) "Ho et al. (2020) found that predicting eps worked best..." ​ So this left me wondering if the noise predictor is trying to compute (1) the epsilon that was added to x_0 through the close-form formula or (2) the noise added in the previous timestep to obtain x_t from x_{t-1} (i.e., eps_t or eps_{t-1}, idk...)? ​ Thank you :) submitted by /u/Christs_Elite [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello all, I recently did a summer research project implementing GPT-2 to generate mazes. The core concept of the model is to combine a bunch of popular maze generation algorithms into one. The goal was that the transformer will be able to identify key components using self-attention and piece together different algorithms. Most maze generation algorithms result in almost a finger print (like in chaos theory). The end goal was to mimic a higher degree of randomness / make the mazes appear less algorithmic. I'm dipping my toes into the realm of research and am looking for feedback. So far I've run the model for 5x5 mazes, it would be interesting to try training the model with varying dimensions. Feel free to join in and contribute to the project! https://github.com/noah-hein/mazeGPT 5x5 live generation https://i.redd.it/v6smbdd88gsb1.gif ​ submitted by /u/noah-hein [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am currently working on a binary classification problem where I aim to predict whether a customer will make a purchase in the next 30 days based on their transaction history. I have a dataset of 1,000 transactions with the following features: TransactionAmount (float): The amount of the transaction. ProductCategory (categorical): Category of the product purchased (e.g., Groceries, Electronics, Books). DateOfPurchase (datetime): The date on which the transaction occurred. I've done some preprocessing and feature engineering, including normalization, one-hot encoding of categorical variables, creating interaction terms, and adding features like days since the first purchase and whether the purchase was made during the holiday season.Dataset is balanced and cleaned. I started with a base Random Forest classifier with default parameters as a starting point, but the performance is not satisfactory (accuracy = 48.5%, ROC-AUC = 0.485). I tried other models as well but was unable to improve the accuracy by more than 57%. submitted by /u/SnooTigers4634 [link] [comments]

Making a post for EMNLP 2023 results to come out today. submitted by /u/East-Beginning9987 [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

I’ve been given a task to identify if a PCB is faulty or not based on its frequency response. I don’t have labeled data. The data I have are various gain values calculated over frequencies, so my data looks something similar to the table below. PCB | Frequency | G1 | G2 PCB 1 | 1Hz | 0.1 | 1 PCB 1 | 2Hz | 0.2 | 2 PCB2 | 1Hz | 0.3 | 3 PCB2 | 2Hz | 0.4| 4 Each PCB has several G parameters measurements taken over the same set of frequencies. I need to use an auto encoder to identify outliers and I need help in deciding how my feature matrix should look like. For example, let us consider only one data point that is PCB 1, then would a matrix like this make sense? [[ 0.1 0.2 ] - 1st row is all G1 values [1 2]] - 2nd row is all G2 values Similarly the matrix for the other PCBs are also created. I have not included frequency in my feature set because these G parameters have been measured for the same set of frequencies for all PCBs. Is this correct ? Additionally, are there any resources someone can point me to related to finding anomalies in frequency response data ? I am struggling with using the keywords while googling. submitted by /u/Savage_Garbage [link] [comments]

Paper. I am not affiliated with this paper or its authors. Twitter thread (Nitter alternative for those who want to see the entire thread without being logged into Twitter). Related work: Sparse Autoencoders Find Highly Interpretable Features in Language Models. submitted by /u/Wiskkey [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Researchers at Meta trained a deep learning model on brain recordings and audio data from 169 people listening to speech. Their method achieves up to 73% accuracy at identifying a 3-second clip of speech from non-invasive EEG or MEG scans. This is a massive improvement over previous attempts at decoding speech from neural signals. It approaches the performance of studies using implanted electrodes. The key innovations: A contrastive loss function that aligns latent speech and brain representations Leveraging pretrained speech models like wav2vec 2.0 Training one model on multiple subjects with individual tuning Being able to decode speech intention from brainwaves could one day help restore communication for patients suffering from strokes, ALS, etc. There's still a ways to go before this becomes a medical reality. Performance needs to improve and be validated during speech production rather than just passive listening. And the accuracy isn't high enough for natural conversations. But this is a hugely promising step toward brain-computer interfaces. Really interesting work at the intersection of neuroscience and AI! TLDR: New model achieves up to 73% accuracy decoding speech directly from non-invasive brain scans. Could eventually help patients with neurological conditions communicate just by thinking. Full summary here. Paper is here submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Discussion thread for EMNLP 2023 notifications which will be released in a few hours along with GEM workshop. Best of luck to everyone. submitted by /u/EDEN1998 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey all, I am working with stock market data and scratching my head if certain variables are ordinal and can be left as is or if it is nominal and should be one-hot encoded. One of the variables in question consists of the direction of the market over a certain time. It has three categories: up, down, sideways. hope was to code them as 1, -1 and 0 respectively and treat as ordinal. There appears to be some order/relationship between them but not sure if it is enough. Is this the correct approach or should it be one-hot encoded? submitted by /u/Fishpo0 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I've been out of the deep learning space for a while now and I'd like to take an online course, or set of courses, to get myself back up to speed on the latest techniques, architectures, and how to use them. I think the DeepLearning.ai specialization through Coursera is a good match, but I see that it uses Tensorflow. Is there any course like this that would use PyTorch? Or would the transition not be too hard once the fundamentals are in place? Thanks! submitted by /u/ComicFoil [link] [comments]

Need some help what is the best way to start. Pls Advice ! I have a specific code in my repos (lets say .net + JS). The goal is to have prompt based code adjustments to existing repos (like very focused copilot) . Either using single agent or using something like AutoGen. So let say I have thousands of files with code and some descriptions about code functionality (spec) . I want either to generate code based on next spec and I want newly generated code to be similar in style to what is in my repos. So now questions: Should I vectorize my code (What is best way to do that ?) or try to fine tune some model ? Give me your ideas / experience in code generation based on previous code. submitted by /u/mcwin1 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I decided to open-source my own web scraping API that I'm using to get information from different websites without using any selectors or XPath. Just provide the URL and a desired JSON schema, and it will return extracted data. Hope this can be helpful for someone. Cheers! https://github.com/semanser/JsonGenius https://preview.redd.it/icq1i8slvesb1.png?width=4096&format=png&auto=webp&s=ac86ccdb3da5ef1ffa86e3473619162f6b652ac6 submitted by /u/semanser [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Can LLMs actually improve their own reasoning by self-correcting mistakes? A new paper from DeepMind and the University of Illinois looks to answer this quantitatively. The results show that unaided, LLMs struggle at self-correction for reasoning tasks. The core issue is LLMs have trouble reliably evaluating the correctness of their own responses. They rarely identify flaws in initial reasoning. Sometimes LLMs even alter initially correct responses to become incorrect after self-correction! (I've personally seen this when interacting with ChatGPT many times and you probably have too). More complex techniques like critiquing between LLM instances don't help much either. External feedback or guidance looks necessary to improve reasoning (Well, some interesting parallels to this paper here about implicit improvement from preference data vs traditional RLHF). Self-correction does show promise for things like making responses more polite or safe though. Criteria there are more clear-cut. The authors argue we need to balance enthusiasm with realistic expectations on self-correction. It has a lot of limits for improving reasoning (at least with current models). But they suggest promising directions like incorporating high-quality external feedback from humans, training data, and tools. That could be key to unlocking self-correction's potential down the road. TLDR: Basically title... LLMs can't reliably self-correct reasoning yet. Maybe hybrid techniques combining self-correction with external guidance could work but we need more research. Full summary. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Calling all AI researchers! Using data aggregation, harmonization, fusion, and other data enhancement methods, you can help the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK) enhance the utility of NIDDK datasets for AI applications. The goal of the NIDDK Data Centric Challenge will be to generate an “AI-ready” dataset that can be used for future data challenges, using data on Type 1 Diabetes available through the NIDDK Central Repository. Register today! https://www.challenge.gov/?challenge=niddk-central-repository-data-centric-challenge submitted by /u/DataCentricChallenge [link] [comments]

in the Meta Llama 2 license agreement (that can be found here), there is a section of "Prohibited Uses" that clearly states several use cases that the signer must accept upon himself, but several of them state the word "facilitate", as far as i can understand, if we use Llama 2 as part of a commercial product, and some end-user will use the product in malicious way (say cause the chat-bot to write the recipe of mustard gas) then this could be considered that the creator of the product is facilitating the end-user, ​ so my questions are: do you think this is a fair interpretation of the agreement ? does that mean the creator is liable to whatever the model spit out ? is there a way to censor the model (short of retraining a new model, or fine-tune on a large scale) ? is there an open source model that already gone through the process, and more safe for commercial use ? ​ https://preview.redd.it/3zo3tm4e8esb1.png?width=1197&format=png&auto=webp&s=8aa522183f82ba8f85edb69cbaabd93262efd516 ​ as per @gentlecucumber advice, i also posted it on r/legaladvice: https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/170ll2t/d_is_meta_llama_2_license_agreement_safe_to_sign/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3 submitted by /u/Particular_Flower_12 [link] [comments]

Which would be the best OCR toolkit to invest the effort to learning and building a pipeline for an OCR system that will be used to extract Japanese text? I tried Tesseract initially and although I got some good results, I found it hard to do finetuning due to messy and outdated documentation. I haven't had the time to look at the other two OCR tools yet but if anyone had any experience, please do share them especially with how easy or difficult is the finetuning process as well as deploying the tuned models. submitted by /u/Spitfire_ex [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi, our company plans for some budget in 2024 to invest into hardware to do the following - running local LLMs for our coworkers to interfere with an locally running offline GPT alike ChatGPT. Use cases: generating templates for email, letters etc Translation (EN/GER/FR/SPA) Querying internal knowledge bases and/or FAQs/HOWTOs I did some research but it is still hard for me to estimate what are the HW / AI skill requirements to implement something not a quarter as good as ChatGPT. Ive played with Nomics gpt4all which comes close to a baseline. We cant use cloud services due to our data privacy policy, so I checked on what would be a good starting point to invest into hardware. I came up with a gamer PC (octacore Intel i9/AMD Ryzen 7) utilizing NVidia RTX 4090 (24Gb) / Radeon RX 7900 / 2TB SSD / 64Gb RAM for approximately 3600 Eur. I am pretty sure that would be sufficient to host a decent LLM serving simultaneous client requests. But is there also a way to adapt / process our companies data? Most sources state that proper LLMs were trained using hundreds of NVidia A100 and thousands of CPUs. On the other hand we would be fine with just fine-tuning a pretrained model. Could you please point me to some sources to learn more about possibilities and requirements as to be able to make well-informed investment decisions? Also, we probably lack the required skills, and would be interested to learn if there are companies and/or projects assisting with this kind of task? thanks submitted by /u/EatTFM [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Is there any good research on which benchmarks LoRAs are most effective at impacting, or are they relegated mostly to changing the style of an LLM's response? submitted by /u/30299578815310 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I have a regression model, predicting a popularity of a text. I have its performance metrics on test set, e.g. RMSE and MAE. This gives me an uncertainty estimate about its predictions. Now I want to transform the text in some way, e.g. give it to human experts or another model to "upgrade" (in terms of getting better popularity). So I have the original and transformed text. Now I have 3 popularity scores: true popularity for original text predicted popularity for original text predicted popularity for transformed text Obviously, if model MAE is for example around 5, and predicted popularity for transformed text is higher than for the original by 1.5, this can be totally random, due to errors in the model prediction. How can I measure if text transformation is beneficial, i.e. statistically significantly better than the original text, incorporating information about model quality? Requiring that the improvement has to be higher than model error would be incredibly strict. submitted by /u/qalis [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/wojcech [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02244 Abstract: By classifying infinite-width neural networks and identifying the optimal limit, Tensor Programs IV and V demonstrated a universal way, called μP, for widthwise hyperparameter transfer, i.e., predicting optimal hyperparameters of wide neural networks from narrow ones. Here we investigate the analogous classification for depthwise parametrizations of deep residual networks (resnets). We classify depthwise parametrizations of block multiplier and learning rate by their infinite-width-then-depth limits. In resnets where each block has only one layer, we identify a unique optimal parametrization, called Depth-μP that extends μP and show empirically it admits depthwise hyperparameter transfer. We identify feature diversity as a crucial factor in deep networks, and Depth-μP can be characterized as maximizing both feature learning and feature diversity. Exploiting this, we find that absolute value, among all homogeneous nonlinearities, maximizes feature diversity and indeed empirically leads to significantly better performance. However, if each block is deeper (such as modern transformers), then we find fundamental limitations in all possible infinite-depth limits of such parametrizations, which we illustrate both theoretically and empirically on simple networks as well as Megatron transformer trained on Common Crawl. Interesting, great to see this line of work continued, muP was great, now Depth-muP submitted by /u/_puhsu [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

A campaign using AI voice cloning technology to impersonate Omar al-Bashir, the former leader of Sudan, has gained attention on TikTok. The anonymous account has been posting what it claims are 'leaked recordings' of the ex-president, despite Bashir not being seen in public for a year and being believed to be seriously ill. Experts warn that campaigns like this demonstrate how new tools can quickly and cheaply distribute fake content through social media. The authenticity of the recordings has been questioned, but evidence suggests that voice conversion software has been used to mimic Bashir's voice. TikTok has taken down the account, stating that it violated their guidelines on posting false content and the use of synthetic media. Source : https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-66987869 submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

I love Bard. It eloquently tells me things in a way that meets and exceeds my expectations, and even more than GPT-4. But what is Google's strategy behind programming it to say things that it knows are not true? Do they train it to say what the user wants to hear? If so, that's disconcerting to say the least, although could be a brilliant way to comb users for enhancement requests. Here is my most recent experience, a humorous example which I feel illustrates the point perfectly: Me: Bard, can you take a .wav audio file and create a phoneme transcript using the IPA symbol library? Bard: Yes, I can work from a .wav audio file to transcribe your speech into IPA phonemes. You can upload the file to a cloud storage service such as Google Drive. Me: Great. Here's the link to the file: <link…

Join us! /r/thisiswhyaiwasmade is where we have fun and celebrate the enjoyable and entertaining side of the tech. Need a place to put your silly and playful prompts, AI generated content, ideas for ways the bend the rules of AI? This is the place! submitted by /u/unknowingafford [link] [comments]

In the context of maximizing positive impact, AI has transformative potential in healthcare. Let's start with personalized medicine. AI can analyze vast data sets, consisting of genetic, environmental, and lifestyle variables, to tailor medical treatments for individuals. This level of personalization could substantially increase treatment effectiveness and reduce adverse side effects. We're not just talking about better pills; we're envisioning targeted gene therapies and custom-tailored interventions that could be more curative rather than merely palliative. Beyond personalization, AI can democratize healthcare access. Remote areas without specialists could have AI systems that diagnose and recommend treatments, making quality healthcare accessible without the need for extensive travel. Telemedicine could be supercharged by AI, offering medical consultations and second opinions to anyone with internet access. Moreover, AI could lead breakthroughs in drug discovery and epidemiology. It could analyze complex biochemical interactions at a speed unattainable by humans, slashing the time and cost to bring new drugs to market. On a larger scale, AI could monitor and model the spread of diseases, providing actionable insights for containment and treatment strategies. So, AI in healthcare is not merely an incremental improvement. It's a paradigm shift that could equalize healthcare access and significantly extend human life while improving its quality. All these advancements could happen within our lifetime, changing the face of medicine and, by extension, society. submitted by /u/Georgeo57 [link] [comments]

Functioning. Humans use the brain's computing power, memory, and ability to think, whereas AI-powered machines rely on data and specific instructions fed into the system. Besides, it takes a very long time for humans to process and understand the problems and gets accustomed to them. submitted by /u/Virtual-Study-Campus [link] [comments]

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submitted by /u/Senior_tasteey [link] [comments]

Mustafa Suleyman, the cofounder of DeepMind and CEO of Inflection AI, discusses his concerns about AI risks and the need for precaution. He believes that while some extreme scenarios may be over the top, it's important to treat powerful technologies with caution. Suleyman highlights the middle layer of AI risks that people often underestimate, which involves the amplification of goals for both good and bad actors. He emphasizes the need to contain AI to prevent potential negative consequences. Suleyman talks about the balance between risks and opportunities in technology and the importance of considering both aspects. He mentions the hype around generative AI and the need to look beyond the surface to understand its true potential. Suleyman discusses the discussions with lawmakers about AI and the challenge of bridging the gap between policy makers and tech experts. Source : https://venturebeat.com/ai/deepmind-cofounder-is-tired-of-knee-jerk-bad-takes-about-ai/ submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/norcalnatv [link] [comments]

Can LLMs actually improve their own reasoning by self-correcting mistakes? A new paper from DeepMind and the University of Illinois looks to answer this quantitatively. The results show that unaided, LLMs struggle at self-correction for reasoning tasks. The core issue is LLMs have trouble reliably evaluating the correctness of their own responses. They rarely identify flaws in initial reasoning. Sometimes LLMs even alter initially correct responses to become incorrect after self-correction! (I've personally seen this when interacting with ChatGPT many times and you probably have too). More complex techniques like critiquing between LLM instances don't help much either. External feedback or guidance looks necessary to improve reasoning (Well, some interesting parallels to this paper here about implicit improvement from preference data vs traditional RLHF). Self-correction does show promise for things like making responses more polite or safe though. Criteria there are more clear-cut. The authors argue we need to balance enthusiasm with realistic expectations on self-correction. It has a lot of limits for improving reasoning (at least with current models). But they suggest promising directions like incorporating high-quality external feedback from humans, training data, and tools. That could be key to unlocking self-correction's potential down the road. TLDR: Basically title... LLMs can't reliably self-correct reasoning yet. Maybe hybrid techniques combining self-correction with external guidance could work but we need more research. Full summary. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]

Buddy no of the tool where I can take an image have an AI translated and replace the text with the same style and have it in the new language like for example translating a Japanese image to English and have it look exactly the same just in English I'm looking for a free one that doesn't require credits it can be a desktop app or a website doesn't matter just needs to be free submitted by /u/agentduckman12 [link] [comments]

Hey there! I'm a 1-man card game designer and while juggling the project as well as mt senior year of college, I have been relying heavily on AI-generated artwork to speed up my workflow with some illustrations and other forms of world-building. In regards to the recent legal decisions (in the US), in which any work produced by AI cannot be copyrighted, how much do I need to change the illustrations to become my own, if I even can at all? Thanks! Edit for clarity: I am also an illustrator. So this question comes from the perspective of an artist trying to save time and energy for other projects submitted by /u/Luke192 [link] [comments]

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Jamie Dimon says the next generation of employees will work 3.5 days a week and live to 100 years old submitted by /u/AminoOxi [link] [comments]

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In this post, we explain how to build and optimize a custom classification model using Amazon Comprehend. We demonstrate this using an Amazon Comprehend custom classification to build a multi-label custom classification model, and provide guidelines on how to prepare the training dataset and tune the model to meet performance metrics such as accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 score.  ( 8 min )

Large language models (LLMs) have captured the imagination and attention of developers, scientists, technologists, entrepreneurs, and executives across several industries. These models can be used for question answering, summarization, translation, and more in applications such as conversational agents for customer support, content creation for marketing, and coding assistants. Recently, Meta released Llama 2 for both […]  ( 7 min )

Amid the race to make AI bigger and better, Lincoln Laboratory is developing ways to reduce power, train efficiently, and make energy use transparent.  ( 11 min )

submitted by /u/nickb [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/nickb [link] [comments]

When I was writing my post on lemniscate functions yesterday, a line from the Wikipedia article seemed familiar for reasons I cannot place. Defining a tangent-sum operator as a ⊕ b := tan(arctan ⁡ a + arctan ⁡ b) gives cl² z ⊕ sl² z = 1. I feel like I’ve seen this tangent-sum used before, but […] Tangent sum first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 6 min )

We begin with a couple examples. First, the set of linear transformations from one vector space to another is itself a vector space. Second, the set of continuous linear operators from one Banach space to another is itself a Banach space. Or maybe better, this set can be made into a Banach space. In the […] Enriched categories first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 6 min )

This is the fourth post in a series on generalizations of sine and cosine. The first post looked at defining sine as the inverse of the inverse sine. The reason for this unusual approach is that the inverse sine is given in terms of an arc length and an integral. We can generalize sine by […] p-norm trig functions and “squigonometry” first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

This is the third post in a series on generalizing sine and cosine. The previous post looked at a generalization of the sine and cosine functions that come from replacing a circle with a lemniscate, a curve that looks like a figure eight. This post looks at replacing the circle with a hyperbola. On the […] Geometric derivation of hyperbolic trig functions first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

HoloAssist is a new multimodal dataset consisting of 166 hours of interactive task executions with 222 participants. Discover how it offers invaluable data to advance the capabilities of next-gen AI copilots for real-world tasks. The post HoloAssist: A multimodal dataset for next-gen AI copilots for the physical world appeared first on Microsoft Research.  ( 10 min )

Connecting with researchers, collaborating across disciplines, and exploring a new city—PhD students Jennifer Scurrell and Alejandro Cuevas talk to Senior Researcher Madeleine Daepp about the internship experience at Microsoft Research. The post Intern Insights: Dr. Madeleine Daepp with Jennifer Scurrell and Alejandro Cuevas appeared first on Microsoft Research.  ( 29 min )

Just as athletes train for a game or actors rehearse for a performance, surgeons prepare ahead of an operation. Now, Atlas Meditech is letting brain surgeons experience a new level of realism in their pre-surgery preparation with AI and physically accurate simulations. Atlas Meditech, a brain-surgery intelligence platform, is adopting tools — including the MONAI Read article >  ( 7 min )

October brings more than falling leaves and pumpkin spice lattes for GeForce NOW members. Get ready for nearly 60 new games to stream, including Forza Motorsport and 16 more PC Game Pass titles. Assassin’s Creed Mirage leads 29 new games to hit the GeForce NOW library this week. In addition, catch a challenge to earn Read article >  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/nickb [link] [comments]

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submitted by /u/nickb [link] [comments]

I know several people that tell me whenever they say something out loud, they start seeing it advertised to them or on their feed. But for me, if I think of certain things, even if I never said it out loud, it will appear on my feed.. has anything similar been happening to anyone else? submitted by /u/GuaranteedBigBoy [link] [comments]

Excited to introduce BlindChat (https://github.com/mithril-security/blind_chat), an open-source, privacy-centric alternative to ChatGPT for in-browser Conversational AI! We provide full local inference in browser, by using libraries from Hugging Face like transformers.js or candle for WASM inference. We have supported several small models, the latest one being Phi-1.5, the 1.3B model that beat Llama 2 7b! As Microsoft’s researchers mentioned in their paper, the model often produces incorrect code and statements. They are just suggestions, and this model is not trained for instruction tuning, so it might be harder to use than regular chat. More info on their model card (https://huggingface.co/microsoft/phi-1_5). We would love to have your feedback on our project, as we are aiming to build a privacy-first and open-source alternative to ChatGPT! submitted by /u/Separate-Still3770 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

How can we tackle vanishing gradient problem by changing the learning rate? Is it possible? submitted by /u/InternationalBack472 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

pip install output-shape It is a minimalistic and simple alternative to torchsummary with a simple print of the output shape of a layer, or custom layer. For torch.nn.MultiheadAttention, it handles both the output shape and the attn matrix separately. https://github.com/avocardio/output-shape Currently only works with PyTorch models, soon with Tensorflow / Keras as well. Jax is also on the list for later! submitted by /u/capital-man [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello, What are your thoughts on current Vector DB offerings? For instance: Do you think the pricing for them is reasonable/viable? Do you think there’s a sufficient level of developer/user experience? What about for those who aren’t necessarily specialized in data? If you like a managed service, why do you prefer it over the open source alternatives? submitted by /u/LucasSaysHello [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Project Page Paper Code We present a novel type of neural fields that uses general radial bases for signal representation. State-of-the-art neural fields typically rely on grid-based representations for storing local neural features and N-dimensional linear kernels for interpolating features at continuous query points. The spatial positions of their neural features are fixed on grid nodes and cannot well adapt to target signals. Our method instead builds upon general radial bases with flexible kernel position and shape, which have higher spatial adaptivity and can more closely fit target signals. To further improve the channel-wise capacity of radial basis functions, we propose to compose them with multi-frequency sinusoid functions. This technique extends a radial basis to multiple Fourier radial bases of different frequency bands without requiring extra parameters, facilitating the representation of details. Moreover, by marrying adaptive radial bases with grid-based ones, our hybrid combination inherits both adaptivity and interpolation smoothness. We carefully designed weighting schemes to let radial bases adapt to different types of signals effectively. Our experiments on 2D image and 3D signed distance field representation demonstrate the higher accuracy and compactness of our method than prior arts. When applied to neural radiance field reconstruction, our method achieves state-of-the-art rendering quality, with small model size and comparable training speed. submitted by /u/Sirisian [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi guys ! I am going to purchase a laptop for programming and AI tasks. I will be working on a simulation software project related to the trajectory of an object in 2d and 3d space. Which laptop will be the most suitable for these tasks and it should have high battery backup because the place where I work does not have enough power sockets. The first laptop which came into my mind was Macbook pro with M2 pro chip and Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon gen 10. Suggest me the best. submitted by /u/smitherium [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I have only 200 samples but about 30 features. What are some effective commonly used feature selection algorithms? I want to identify the features that play the most significant role in generating outcomes. submitted by /u/Shina-pig [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

About a week ago, I submitted my first paper into one of the most prestigious Machine Learning conferences out there. This was a last minute submission, and my supervisor and I were working on it simultaneously until the very last moment. Sadly, my supervisor committed an error when writing the mathematical definition of a certain set, slightly changing its meaning. This change, even though small, changes the definition in such a way that the subsequent theorem and its proof isn't formally correct anymore, as it assumes the original definition of the set, not the new one. How much will this affect the decision of accepting or rejecting my paper? The whole method, results and consequences are still the same, no matter this definition. It's more a problem of a "formal" nature (here "formal" as a word in the mathematical sense). Is there a other way that I can inform about this error without changing the content maybe? I know that at some point, they give a chance to edit the original paper, but I don't know if this is after the decision to accept/reject. submitted by /u/howtorewriteaname [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

So, a few months ago, I started developing this deep learning model, which was made purely to differentiate whether the input image is driftwood floating in water or a crocodile. To my knowledge, I leveraged the resnet50 pre-trained SoTA model to train my deep learning model, and for that, I downloaded almost 5k images of driftwood and crocodiles for my model training. Once the training was complete, I took the next step and deployed my model on the Hugging Face Spaces app, allowing my friends to put it to the test. But here's where I ran into a significant challenge: users could even upload their own selfies, and my model would attempt to predict whether they were a crocodile or a piece of driftwood! So how can I leverage object detection or the image segmentation pipeline so that when the user inputs their image, it tries to detect the object from the photo and then detect whether the detected object from the given image contains a crocodile or not? If the crocodile or driftwood is not found then it should return "No object found" or like that. submitted by /u/meWhoObserves [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Paper - https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02207 submitted by /u/MysteryInc152 [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Hello Redditors in r/MachineLearning We are the team behind ML Workbench, an upcoming integrated platform designed to streamline your entire machine learning lifecycle. From data preprocessing and model training to validation and deployment, we aim to make the process as seamless as possible. But here's the thing: we need your insights to build something that truly resonates with the community and solves real-world problems. 📝 Click Here to Take the Survey Why Should You Care? Unified Experience: Imagine managing all your ML tasks in one integrated environment. High-Performance Computing: We're leveraging powerful A100 GPUs to accelerate your work. User-Centric Design: Whether you're a beginner or a pro, the platform is designed to cater to all skill levels. Collaboration: Built-in features to make team collaboration effortless. What's in the Survey? The survey contains questions about your current challenges, the tools you use, and what you'd love to see in an ML platform. It should only take about 5-10 minutes to complete. Thank You Gift As a small token of our appreciation, we're offering exclusive early access to the platform for selected participants. Don't miss this chance to be among the first to experience what we're building! 📝 Click Here to Take the Survey Your feedback is crucial for us to create a tool that we hope will make a significant positive impact in the machine learning community. Thank you for taking the time to read this post and participate in our survey. Cheers, The ML Workbench Team submitted by /u/nonononottodayorever [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi, I'm looking to create a model that given a sequence of frames from a video, returns a probability distribution over a set of events that may have occurred in those frames (probably 5 - 10 events). The training data will consist of video and hand labelled frame index/event pairs. I'm not too concerned about handling simultaneous events. It would be super helpful for some suggestions on a model architecture that would yield the best results and/or good papers/examples that achieve something similar. Thanks! submitted by /u/Dredgefort [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I created a video tutorial that tries to demonstrate that semantic search (using embeddings) is not always necessary for RAG (retrieval augmented generation). It was inspired by the following Cohere blog post: https://txt.cohere.com/rerank/ I code up a minimal RAG pipeline: OpenSearch -> Rerank -> Chat completion (without using Langchain or similar libraries) and then see how it performs on various queries. Hope some of you find it helpful. Feel free to share any feedback@ Video link: https://youtu.be/OsE7YcDcPz0 submitted by /u/mildlyoverfitted [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

AMR parsing is a fun task where researchers map texts onto little graphs that explicate their meaning, so called Abstract Meaning Representations (AMRs). While arguably not the top NLP benchmark regarding popularity, research has been active for the last 10 years, including at major NLP conferences such as ACL/NAACL/EACL/EMNLP etc. Funnily, I recently found some vulnerabilities in the evaluation protocol, and if we exploit these vulnerabilities, we can get the highest score on the benchmark. To get an overview over the issue (without understanding AMR), imagine a cooking contest that takes place regularly, say, once a year. In all events, we have the same judge, participants are amateurs, meals are scored on 0 to 100, with 100 meaning “it can’t possibly get better”. Over the years, the …  ( 10 min )

Hi all, I'm curious if anyone has a stand-out article they believe would prompt a lively discussion in a journal club I have coming up. Something that may have people take sides, or maybe a recent breakthrough in the ML space as it relates to clinical/health care. ​ Thanks! submitted by /u/veilofosiris [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Paper - https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.02226 submitted by /u/MysteryInc152 [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

So basically I have a dataset with images of vehicles in top down view in both RGB and IR, what are some models I can use for both unimodal and multimodal object detection to compare their performance. Links to GitHub repos would be helpful. Thanks submitted by /u/Xyber5 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey everyone! Currently, I am working on a project around music emotion classifcation/regression model. Basically I am trying to predict a score to each emotion on a given song. The problem is that my dataset has quite imbalanced scores (y). Most scores are centered around a certain score range. Therefore, having difficulties predicting scores that are further away of the mean values. I had this idea to bring in pre-trained (on other datasets and problems) audio classification models into this as there are a bunch of good performing pre-trained classification models out there already. The prediction of these pre-trained models should be used as features (e.g. prediction of genre, instrument etc) beside the original spectorgram in my model. I know this won't solve the problem of imbalances in the scores but I thought maybe this could improve the performance as the model would have more features to work with. Does this make sense? I appreciate any input. submitted by /u/Kniggi [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Does anyone have an idea why the LOMO optimizer (low memory optimizer) which was released a few months ago is not widely available and everyone still uses either Adam or SGD? While the paper looks really promising submitted by /u/RedMoula [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi! I recently have seen systems that monitor breathing rate of an infant through camera. I have read several articles on that topic, where people used things like 3D camera, RGB or Interferometric Radar Sensor. Do you guys have any idea on how to accurately measure this? submitted by /u/kaina_m [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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I am part of a Machine Learning team that has experienced significant growth recently. When we were a small team, tracking projects was straightforward. However, as the team has expanded, it's become increasingly challenging to keep track of everything. We are part of a larger corporation, so we have access to tools for creating epics and boards. However, these corporate tools are too generic and don't provide the level of detail I need for internal management. Specifically, I'm looking for a way to track model versions, dataset versions, and the overall status of our projects. I'd also like to be able to assign team members to projects. Currently, we use a MIRO board, but it's disorganized and difficult to read and update. I'd love to hear what tools or strategies you've used for similar situations, especially since our team is expected to grow even more, making tracking increasingly complex. submitted by /u/Spiritual_Narwhal649 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

In the previous post I said that you could define the inverse sine as the function that gives the arc length along a circle, then define sine to be the inverse of the inverse sine. The purpose of such a backward definition is that it generalizes to other curves besides the circle. For example, it […] Lemniscate functions first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

In a recent post I mentioned in passing that trigonometry can be generalized from functions associated with a circle to functions associated with other curves. This post will go into that a little further. The equation of the unit circle is and so in the first quadrant The length of an arc from (1, 0) […] Generalized trigonometry first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

For NVIDIA Senior AI Scientist Jim Fan, the video game Minecraft served as the “perfect primordial soup” for his research on open-ended AI agents. In the latest AI Podcast episode, host Noah Kravitz spoke with Fan on using large language models to create AI agents — specifically to create Voyager, an AI bot built with Read article >  ( 6 min )

California has a new weapon against the wildfires that have devastated the state: AI. A freshly launched system powered by AI trained on NVIDIA GPUs promises to provide timely alerts to first responders across the Golden State every time a blaze ignites. The ALERTCalifornia initiative, a collaboration between California’s wildfire fighting agency CAL FIRE and Read article >  ( 6 min )

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Using AI to improve Cheetos? That's something PepsiCo has experimented with. On today’s POLITICO Tech, Athina Kanioura, chief strategy and transformation officer for PepsiCo, says that using AI to make employees faster and more efficient hasn’t led PepsiCo to replace human workers as many fear. And why the company has determined that in some jobs the technology is simply off limits. Listen to the interview here: https://politico-tech.simplecast.com/episodes/why-pepsico-is-powering-your-snacks-with-ai submitted by /u/smo279 [link] [comments]

LLMs keep getting more capable at generating natural language. But there's always room for improving the quality and alignment of their responses. Typically this requires lots of human effort to collect more training data. So researchers are exploring ways for models to self-improve without human involvement. Many methods use prompting - giving the LLM instructions to critique and refine its responses. But coming up with comprehensive prompts is challenging. The new approach proposed, called PIT, lets models learn self-improvement implicitly from human preference data instead. It reformulates reinforcement learning to maximize the gap between an original response and improved response conditioned on the original. This taps into the implicit guidance in the preference data on what constitutes better quality, so no manual rubrics are needed. PIT uses curriculum reinforcement learning - first improving easy references, then switching to the LLM's own samples. Experiments on real and synthetic datasets show PIT significantly outperforms prompting methods like Self-Refine. It improved response quality 7-34% across conditions without any human involvement. This demonstrates a promising direction for LLMs to align better with human preferences autonomously as they learn from experience. No need for human bottlenecks when expanding to new domains or underserved use cases. Very cool! TLDR: New method PIT enables LLMs to implicitly learn to refine themselves from human preference data, no prompts needed. Big improvement over prompting approaches. Full Summary Arxiv is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.00898 submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]

AI Grant is offering $5k in grants or $250k in funding for AI startups. The program is backed by OG's AI Grant, an accelerator for AI startups. The grant includes an uncapped SAFE investment of $250,000 for AI-native product startups, $350,000 in Azure credits, a summit in San Francisco with advisors and founders, and various other startup benefits and credits. The program was created by Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. Applications for Batch 3 will open in a few months, but early applications are accepted. The program is open to anyone, and it is looking for companies or projects that leverage AI models in a useful or engaging way. Source : https://aigrant.com/ submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

https://www.imagineworldwide.org/ "What is Child-Directed, Tech-Enabled Learning? Children drive their own learning, at their own pace, using software that provides a complete, research-based curriculum and pedagogy. Adults play a supportive, facilitative role. The software is delivered to the learner on a tablet, without connectivity, and charged by solar power or other appropriate energy sources... With hundreds of millions of children out of school or lacking access to effective schooling, this model can provide every child, everywhere access to learning. Solutions can work without internet access or grid power. Adults play facilitative, rather than instructional, roles. The annual unit cost of the learning solution is less than $7 per child and declining. This includes hardware, software, accessories, power, shipping, and implementation support from Imagine." submitted by /u/Georgeo57 [link] [comments]

Artificial intelligence (AI) is replacing customer service jobs around the world, with chatbots being used to interact directly with customers and solve problems independently. This shift is expected to have a profound effect on economies, particularly in countries like India and the Philippines where call centers provide millions of jobs. While some argue that AI will provide support to remaining call center workers and improve job satisfaction, others warn that it could lead to job losses and a need for workforce adaptation. The use of AI software tools in call centers has shown potential for improving productivity and customer satisfaction. Source : https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/10/03/ai-customer-service-jobs/ submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

Female-founded AI startups in the UK account for just 2% of funding deals over the past decade, according to a report by the Alan Turing Institute. When female-founded companies do secure funding, they raise an average of £1.3m per deal, compared to £8.6m raised by all-male founder teams. The report highlights the urgent need for gender balance in AI investment, as the industry is predicted to grow significantly in the coming years. Recommendations to improve gender balance include improving recruitment, monitoring investment practices, and diversifying the ecosystem. There is an increasing demand for generative AI products, with leading tech companies investing heavily. Gender diversity gaps and uneven progress rates for ethnic and racial groups are observed across investment firms. AI products have shown biases, such as passport checkers working less efficiently with darker skin and tools reinforcing gender stereotypes. In 2019, a UN agency found that assigning female genders to digital assistants like Siri and Alexa perpetuated harmful gender biases. Source : https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/04/female-founded-ai-startups-win-just-2-of-funding-deals-in-uk submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]

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This September, I had the chance to attend the Heidelberg Laureate Forum (HLF) for the second — and probably last — time. The HLF is an incredible experince for young researchers: Mirroring the Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings, the organizers invite laureates from math and computer science together with young researchers pursuing their undergraduate, graduate or post-doc studies. In this article, I want to share impressions and encourage students to apply next year! The post My Impressions (and Application) of the Heidelberg Laureate Forum 2023 appeared first on David Stutz.  ( 7 min )

Analyzing medical images plays a crucial role in diagnosing and treating diseases. The ability to automate this process using machine learning (ML) techniques allows healthcare professionals to more quickly diagnose certain cancers, coronary diseases, and ophthalmologic conditions. However, one of the key challenges faced by clinicians and researchers in this field is the time-consuming and […]  ( 11 min )

Healthcare and life sciences (HCLS) customers are adopting generative AI as a tool to get more from their data. Use cases include document summarization to help readers focus on key points of a document and transforming unstructured text into standardized formats to highlight important attributes. With unique data formats and strict regulatory requirements, customers are […]  ( 9 min )

Prior authorization is a crucial process in healthcare that involves the approval of medical treatments or procedures before they are carried out. This process is necessary to ensure that patients receive the right care and that healthcare providers are following the correct procedures. However, prior authorization can be a time-consuming and complex process that requires […]  ( 7 min )

Posted by Carlos Esteves and Ameesh Makadia, Research Scientists, Google Research, Athena Team Typical deep learning models for computer vision, like convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and vision transformers (ViT), process signals assuming planar (flat) spaces. For example, digital images are represented as a grid of pixels on a plane. However, this type of data makes up only a fraction of the data we encounter in scientific applications. Variables sampled from the Earth's atmosphere, like temperature and humidity, are naturally represented on the sphere. Some kinds of cosmological data and panoramic photos are also spherical signals, and are better treated as such. Using methods designed for planar images to process spherical signals is problematic for a couple of reasons. Firs…  ( 92 min )

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Hello everyone, I want to start experimenting with the domain of multi-tasking and meta-learning, thus I pip installed metaworld which is currently on version 2.0.0 if I'm not mistaken. I wanted to ask in case anybody knows, if there's any recent updated documentation, because the farama foundation on GIthub which is probably responsible for maintaining the Metaworld, has outdated code and documentation. (for example, presented code on Github's README has the command env.step(a) which returns 4 values instead of 5 that newer version outputs). From what I understand, they gather contributors for a big push regarding code and documentation on GItHub, where they will make up things up to date again but this announcement was 7 months ago. Sorry for the potentially wrong format of this question-post, I'm relatively new to reddit. I would appreciate any further knowledge on this topic and thanks everyone who's taking the time to read it! ​ Metaworld Distribution from Farama Foundation on Github: https://github.com/Farama-Foundation/Metaworld submitted by /u/South_Book_5625 [link] [comments]

Hi everyone! We used our opensource library SheepRL 🐑 and our PyTorch implementation of DreamerV3 on Crafter, an open-world survival game, featuring randomly generated 2D worlds, in which players have the freedom to explore a large and expansive map and need to forage for food, collect materials, build tools and find shelter. Here is a short video 👉 https://youtu.be/7XEBT2msUUQ In open-world games, ensuring they are playable and bug-free is crucial, but is becoming increasingly difficult and time-consuming using manual game testing. Maximizing exploration using Reinforcement Learning is extremely useful for testing games at scale, because of the wide variety of gameplay scenes the player may encounter. Why is the test on Crafter so interesting for game testing? Because Crafter evaluates a large number of general capabilities related to the RL agent, like strong ability to generalise (new generated maps for each episode), to deal with partial observability (each input image reveals only a small part of the world) and to long-term reasoning and survival. These abilities are very useful for testing games at scale, providing developers with insights to optimise gameplay and player experience. The future of game testing is here, and it is powered by Artificial Intelligence! 🔥 --- ❌ Are you interested in joining the project community? Get in touch 👉 https://github.com/Eclectic-Sheep/sheeprl ❌ SheepRL 🐑 is open-source, fully written in PyTorch and accelerated with LightningFabric - by Lightning AI. Feel free to use it for your AI projects, and if you want to contribute, we are more than happy to accept your pull requests! ❤️ submitted by /u/Manu_Orobix [link] [comments]

My environment has hybrid action spaces and I was wondering if I can use continuous algorithms for discrete action spaces. I'm asking this because, well, agent can't learn and I'm trying to find the source of error. I was wondering if this was the source of problem. ​ My Assumptions On Solving This Problem: - Discrete is subspace of continuous, thus continuous algorithms will be able to handle discrete action spaces as well. - A non-hybrid action-space algorithm will be simpler than hybrid-action-space algorithms. ​ Method (I'm only describing the discrete action here): - Use TD3 as the training algorithm. No modification from the original training code. TD3 algorithm has been verified on Pendulum and other environments created for unit test purposes. - Policy network outputs the a…

Video game voice actors are prepared to go on strike over the use of AI in game development. The current contract negotiations between the Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) and video game companies have stalled, with the major issues being pay raises and the use of AI to alter or generate actors' performances. SAG-AFTRA wants protections for its members to ensure their work is not stolen or replaced by AI. If negotiations don't progress, voice actors, stunt artists, and motion capture performers could potentially go on strike, leading to delays in game releases and recasting of beloved performers. The voice actors' strike in 2016 resulted in improvements to pay, and now they are prepared to strike again to fight for their rights. Video game performances are often seen as assets to be extracted and inserted into games, rather than recognizing the humanity and quality of life of the performers. The use of AI in game development raises concerns about how companies will use advances in generative AI to steal work or put performers out of a job. SAG-AFTRA wants transparency, consent, and compensation when it comes to the use of AI in games. Members of SAG-AFTRA have voted in favor of authorizing a strike, meaning voice actors, stunt artists, and motion capture performers could potentially join the picket line if negotiations don't progress. The strike could lead to delays in upcoming game releases and the recasting of performers if companies refuse to meet the union's demands. The fight for voice actors' rights is an existential one, as they want to retain the rights to their own voices and images and achieve wages that keep up with inflation Source : https://kotaku.com/sag-aftra-strike-voice-actor-spider-man-ai-union-1850874117 submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Wanted to see if there are any 3X AI generated images available? I’m looking to see how I could use AI to generate images for my website. submitted by /u/IamMoe8868 [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

TikTok ran an ad featuring a deepfake of MrBeast offering iPhone 15 Pros for $2. AI-generated deepfake content is becoming more pervasive on social media platforms. Platforms like TikTok are facing challenges in moderating and handling the rise of AI deepfakes. MrBeast raised concerns about the ability of social media platforms to handle AI deepfakes. TikTok removed the ad and associated account for policy violations. Unauthorized AI-generated content featuring celebrities is a growing problem in platform advertising. The issue is expected to worsen as AI technology improves and becomes more accessible. Transparency and disclosure are crucial in AI-generated ad content featuring celebrities. TikTok is aware of the pervasiveness of AI-generated content on its platform and is taking steps to address it. Source : https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-ran-deepfake-ad-mrbeast-as-ai-generated-content-spreads-2023-10 submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Came across this upcoming game which supposedly let's you create your own worlds and characters to live in the world...they also released a research paper explaining how they're doing it, using LLMs in all sorts of ways, primarily for reasoning and language. I think it could be a pretty fun take on passive games, just populating a world with your characters, checking up on them occasionally, putting them in weird situations lol. infinitia.ai for those who wanna check it out The NPCs do seems to be acting in an interesting way, as i saw in this video they posted on twitter... https://twitter.com/infinitia_app/status/1707102187518628245 ​ Watchall think? Another smallville clone? or something interesting.... submitted by /u/SeaJeweler3723 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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The article discusses the importance of batteries in AI technology and how they limit the capabilities of AI robots. It explores the challenges of current battery technology and the need for better solutions. The article emphasizes the significance of developing ideal batteries that can provide long-lasting power without degradation. Source : https://notes.arkinfo.xyz/p/dont-worry-ai-cannot-takeover-the submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

ByteDance and the University of Illinois researchers have developed an improved benchmark suite with consistent parameters, called GPT-Fathom, that indicates GPT-4, the engine behind the paid version of ChatGPT, significantly outperforms leading LLMs, including its biggest competitor, Claude 2. For the latest advancements in AI, look here first. ​ https://preview.redd.it/v4fo8zser0sb1.png?width=1292&format=png&auto=webp&s=7e29fe9ac1af3efcb936ee61e9202717eed7e702 GPT-Fathom's breakthrough The new benchmark suite, GPT-Fathom, addresses consistent settings issues and prompt sensitivity, attempting to reduce inconsistencies in LLM evaluation. In a comparison using GPT-Fathom, GPT-4 outperformed over ten leading LLMs, crushing the competition in most benchmarks, and showing significant performance leaps from GPT-3 to its successors. Performance specifics The gap in performance was especially pronounced against Claude 2, ChatGPT's biggest rival. GPT-4's Advanced Data Analysis model exhibited superior performance in coding, giving it an edge as compared to LuckLlama 2, the current best-performing open-source model. Llama 2-70B showed comparable or better performance than gpt-3.5-turbo-0613 in safety and comprehension but displayed worse performance in "Mathematics", "Coding", and "Multilingualism". The seesaw effect The research team noted a 'seesaw effect' where an improvement in one area can lead to degradation in another. For instance, GPT-4 saw a performance drop on the Mathematical Geometry Simple Math (MGSM) benchmark, despite improving its performance significantly on the text comprehension benchmark DROP. (source) P.S. If you like this kind of analysis, I write a free newsletter that tracks the most relevant news and developments in AI. Professionals from Meta, Google, and OpenAI are already reading it. submitted by /u/AIsupercharged [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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Prompt: Explain why posting prompts and your responses speeds up AI development in the following ways: It allows us to analyze responses to prompts that we would probably never have thought of. It allows us to share ideas that the open source community would advance. It allows us to better democratize the process of alignment, bringing in as many people as possible. CGPT-4: Posting prompts and AI responses serves multiple functions that are beneficial to the progress of AI development. First off, it exposes AI to a myriad of queries that developers might not have otherwise considered. This wide range of prompts allows the machine to improve its natural language processing abilities, making it more versatile and effective in interpreting and responding to human language. The more dive…  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/usmansid98 [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

LLMs like GPT-3 struggle in streaming uses like chatbots because their performance tanks on long texts exceeding their training length. I checked out a new paper investigating why windowed attention fails for this. By visualizing the attention maps, the researchers noticed LLMs heavily attend initial tokens as "attention sinks" even if meaningless. This anchors the distribution. They realized evicting these sink tokens causes the attention scores to get warped, destabilizing predictions. Their proposed "StreamingLLM" method simply caches a few initial sink tokens plus recent ones. This tweaks LLMs to handle crazy long texts. Models tuned with StreamingLLM smoothly processed sequences with millions of tokens, and were up to 22x faster than other approaches. Even cooler - adding a special "[Sink Token]" during pre-training further improved streaming ability. The model just used that single token as the anchor. I think the abstract says it best: We introduce StreamingLLM, an efficient framework that enables LLMs trained with a finite length attention window to generalize to infinite sequence length without any fine-tuning. We show that StreamingLLM can enable Llama-2, MPT, Falcon, and Pythia to perform stable and efficient language modeling with up to 4 million tokens and more. TLDR: LLMs break on long convos. Researchers found they cling to initial tokens as attention sinks. Caching those tokens lets LLMs chat infinitely. Full summary here Paper link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.17453.pdf submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am starting a podcast on Psychology and Philosophy submitted by /u/21bce [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Crowdfunding site BackerKit has announced a new policy that restricts the use of solely AI-generated content on its platform. The policy aims to address concerns regarding ownership of content, ethical sourcing of data, and compensation for the process of creating content. Projects that lack a minimum requirement of human input will not be allowed to crowdfund on the BackerKit site. There is some flexibility with AI generative fill and the use of AI transcription services, but a high level of human input is required to satisfy the policy. BackerKit will automatically exclude all content uploaded by creators for their projects from AI training in support of this policy. The new restrictions will go into effect on October 4, giving creators time to alter their projects if they are using AI-generated images and text. Source : https://gizmodo.com/backerkit-ai-art-new-policy-crowdfunding-generative-1850891882 submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

iPhone designer Jony Ive is reportedly talking to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman about making an AI hardware device.[1] Visa announced today that it plans to invest $100 million in companies developing generative AI technologies and applications “that will impact the future of commerce and payments.”[2] More than 40% of labor force to be affected by AI in 3 years, Morgan Stanley forecasts. [3] Tom Hanks: Don't fall for "AI version of me" promoting dental plan.[4] Sources: [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/chatgpt-head-iphone-designer-jony-ive-ai-device-openai-report-2023-9?amp [2] https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/02/visa-earmarks-100m-to-invest-in-generative-ai-companies/ [3] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/10/02/more-than-40percent-of-labor-force-to-be-impacted-by-ai-in-three-years-morgan-stanley-forecasts.html [4] https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/tom-hanks-ai-version-of-me-promoting-dental-plan/ submitted by /u/Excellent-Target-847 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am considering comparing mutual information scores, but I also don't think I understand MI well enough. For example, I(X;Y) = H(X) + H(Y) - H(X,Y). To me, visualizing H(X) and H(Y) as venn diagrams and H(X,Y) as the information from both X, Y (like an overlapping venn diagram) makes me think that when X, Y are disjoint, then MI is 0 and when X, Y overlap completely, then the MI score will be high. So, I'm thinking that a high MI value is "bad" since this means X, Y would be redundant. I am not sure if my understanding here is correct. Another method I have tried is to binarize the data for each feature (represented as rows in my dataset) using "present" (1) and "absent" (0). The main issue I have run into doing this is that I am trying to then create a distribution to compare the fea…  ( 10 min )

Hi everyone, I am quite interested in understanding what are the feedback from the community in terms of interface to leverage LLMs for code productivity. Because LLMs tend to do mistake I have mostly used Chat-like interfaces, like ChatGPT, as they allow to interact with the model and converge to a conclusion. I haven't used Copilot for a while but my feeling was that it could do some boilerplate correctly but then it quickly started suggesting code that would be misleading and could actually hurt productivity. It might have changed since then but that was my feeling back then. What is your favorite option and why? View Poll submitted by /u/Separate-Still3770 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello everyone. I am curious to know if anyone has encountered a ML problem like this and if so, I seek your advice. Usually in ML classification such as the IRIS dataset, each row represents a sample and each column a parameter, right ! My problem is that my ML classification parameters have to be derived from a range of values (parent data). I have taken mean of the parent values to generate the parameters for the ML input data. This results in lower classification accuracies using Random forest and XGBoost. Has anyone encountered a similar situation like this where the data has to be generated from a range of other datasets? Is there any other way to do this? I did not find any papers or articles from the web so just asking. I can generate additional parameters from other statistics such as median, standard deviation etc. which can improve the classification accuracy but can make interpretation of the results a little weird, domain wise. I wish to avoid this if possible. submitted by /u/notmyfault7676 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I'm preparing for the ML system design interview for Meta, and I searched for various resources. This book (ML System Design Interview (by Ali Aminian & Alex Xu)) seems like a solid structured resource that covers solutions to case studies in detail. Has anyone used it to prepare for Meta's ML System Design interview? Thoughts? Khang's book doesn't seem to have great reviews. Chip Huyen's book (Designing Machine Learning Systems: An Iterative Process for Production-Ready Applications) doesn't seem very focused on interview prep?? Also, happy to hear about other cool resources to prepare. Thanks very much! submitted by /u/irEFrienfk [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Blog: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/scaling-up-learning-across-many-different-robot-types https://robotics-transformer-x.github.io/ here you can also find the Datasets and Code! Paper: https://robotics-transformer-x.github.io/paper.pdf Abstract: Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for many applications. Can such a consolidation happen in robotics? Conventionally, robotic learning methods train a separate model for every application, every robot, and even every environment. Can we instead train “generalist” X-robot policy that can be adapted efficiently to new robots, tasks, and environments? In this paper, we provide datasets in standardized data formats and models to make it possible to explore this possibility in the context of robotic manipulation, alongside experimental results that provide an example of effective X-robot policies. We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160266 tasks). We show that a high-capacity model trained on this data, which we call RT-X, exhibits positive transfer and improves the capabilities of multiple robots by leveraging experience from other platforms. https://preview.redd.it/oxzutrhtb1sb1.jpg?width=1693&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=37b8b1dbf5f489dc2c8eaca4d15cb9c32ebc2660 https://preview.redd.it/ldsiwshtb1sb1.jpg?width=1494&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fdbf0f91c705acf11bff854f6d6af82dddd47021 https://preview.redd.it/ikk18jitb1sb1.jpg?width=1693&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e50b443dc4b0266a0480d54c4f92a0b708485797 https://preview.redd.it/t5wmciitb1sb1.jpg?width=1361&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2971fd645acb6dcbed2ca3522e311d0772c45964 ​ submitted by /u/Singularian2501 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

For all my corporate ML engineers I have a question, what are the most annoying / biggest problems you face when developing/deploying ML in industry? This can be anywhere from data, to tuning, to even MLOPS. submitted by /u/hai_cben [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am not from CS background, my knowledge is from online courses and books. All of which used some variation of Jupyter notebook. My knowledge of code can be lacking sometimes, since I am not from CS background. I am trying to implement some computer vision paper codes on newer samples. I understand the papers, and the underlying mechanisms. However, I fail to decipher the codes provided with the associated github repository. Usually, these repository contains information on how to recreate the experiment on some specific data using shell. But I am using google Colab for this purpose, as I don't have access to GPU, and I found it impossible to recreate the experiments in the google Colab, using shell commands, let alone extend it to newer samples. I would appreciate some help in this regard, I haven't done this before, and there aren't really any tutorial/resource on how to do this. Ideally, what I am trying to do is separate the model, input some images, get the output, and interpret it. I am stuck, and I would really appreciate some help or advice in this regard. Right now I am trying to work with this paper, meta ood I would appreciate any help/advice/resource anything. I feel very lost. Thanks in Advance. submitted by /u/franticpizzaeater [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello! I'm debating turning my old desktop (old CPU but relatively new GPU 3980 or 90) into a ML box that I can remote into. I'm sure people here have done something similar and I was wondering if anyone could point me towards some resources for getting it off the ground/any pitfalls to avoid/suggestions. I'm an active data scientist researcher for my job and this would just be for fun side projects but I have some pretty glaring holes in my knowledge of computers (like the best way to set this up - should I uninstall windows install unbuntu or is windows fine?) Honestly I'm sure my ignorance will be pretty apparent from the questions I'm asking/not asking so any advice anyone has would be welcome! Thanks! Sorry if this is the wrong subreddit for this sort of thing. ​ submitted by /u/shebaiscool [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.17290 submitted by /u/LucaAmbrogioni [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Hello everyone! ​ I'm currently working on a project and have hit a roadblock in automating the deployment of my machine-learning models. Can anyone provide guidance on the best practices or tools for streamlining the deployment process? Specifically, I'm looking to create a seamless workflow where models can be easily uploaded, deployed on the cloud, and accessible through APIs. Any insights or advice would be greatly appreciated! ​ Automation!!! submitted by /u/homelander81 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi, I just wanted to share an applied image classification problem that I worked on a few years ago: https://vdalv.github.io/2018/09/01/missingMasterpiece.html submitted by /u/vdalv [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello, I need help from someone that knows about XAI. I have to create a XAI model to intérprete the resulta of an AI model, an MLP, that works as an IDS classifier. I have no idea on how to do It and I have been completely blocked for 2.5 years. This is the final project of my career and I just don't know how to do It, and my tutor isn't very helpful. If anyone is able to help I would explain him what I have to do and would be very grateful. Thanks for your help submitted by /u/elMandarine [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello all, I'm trying to plan out for a new web platform development for workforce management but have little experience. We all know that hard coding can be done for general scheduling, including manager polling shifts based on labor category, staff assignments, conflt resolving, emergency scheduling, etc. But what I want to research to is....how can I ensure that one optimal schedule is automatically computed using AI/machine learning tools so that I don't have to go through the list of hard-coded generated schedules (I’m sure these will work fine, but still want to compute one ultimate schedule). submitted by /u/Playful-Bed-2183 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

​ Break-A-Scene: Given a single image with multiple concepts, annotated by loose segmentation masks, our method can learn a distinct token for each concept, and use natural language guidance to re-synthesize the individual concepts or combinations of them in various contexts. Project Page: https://omriavrahami.com/break-a-scene/ Code is publicly released! Abstract Text-to-image model personalization aims to introduce a user-provided concept to the model, allowing its synthesis in diverse contexts. However, current methods primarily focus on the case of learning a single concept from multiple images with variations in backgrounds and poses, and struggle when adapted to a different scenario. In this work, we introduce the task of textual scene decomposition: given a single image of a scene that may contain several concepts, we aim to extract a distinct text token for each concept, enabling fine-grained control over the generated scenes. To this end, we propose augmenting the input image with masks that indicate the presence of target concepts. These masks can be provided by the user or generated automatically by a pre-trained segmentation model. We then present a novel two-phase customization process that optimizes a set of dedicated textual embeddings (handles), as well as the model weights, striking a delicate balance between accurately capturing the concepts and avoiding overfitting. We employ a masked diffusion loss to enable handles to generate their assigned concepts, complemented by a novel loss on cross-attention maps to prevent entanglement. We also introduce union-sampling, a training strategy aimed to improve the ability of combining multiple concepts in generated images. We use several automatic metrics to quantitatively compare our method against several baselines, and further affirm the results using a user study. Finally, we showcase several applications of our method. ​ submitted by /u/sgd_is_all_you_need [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

LLMs like GPT-3 struggle in streaming uses like chatbots because their performance tanks on long texts exceeding their training length. I checked out a new paper investigating why windowed attention fails for this. By visualizing the attention maps, the researchers noticed LLMs heavily attend initial tokens as "attention sinks" even if meaningless. This anchors the distribution. They realized evicting these sink tokens causes the attention scores to get warped, destabilizing predictions. Their proposed "StreamingLLM" method simply caches a few initial sink tokens plus recent ones. This tweaks LLMs to handle crazy long texts. Models tuned with StreamingLLM smoothly processed sequences with millions of tokens, and were up to 22x faster than other approaches. Even cooler - adding a special "[Sink Token]" during pre-training further improved streaming ability. The model just used that single token as the anchor. I think the abstract says it best: We introduce StreamingLLM, an efficient framework that enables LLMs trained with a finite length attention window to generalize to infinite sequence length without any fine-tuning. We show that StreamingLLM can enable Llama-2, MPT, Falcon, and Pythia to perform stable and efficient language modeling with up to 4 million tokens and more. TLDR: LLMs break on long convos. Researchers found they cling to initial tokens as attention sinks. Caching those tokens lets LLMs chat infinitely. Full summary here Paper link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.17453.pdf submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey everyone! My friends and I are taking a Data Science course in our university. We are modestly versed in ML/DL techniques, and want to use everything we know on a really good capstone project for this course. We are looking for a dataset where we can demonstrate a nice variety of techniques to really blow the socks off our Professor. Ideally we'd like this to be stemming from something basic that most would consider "Data Science", as in something with a tabular dataset and elements of classification. Though we still want chances to bring in what we know from outside the course: for example, if there's images to supplement the dataset we could use Image Classification models or something multimodal to bring in more features, if there's natural language data then we could use LLMs to extract salient features etc. More importantly though, we want something whose exploration can be really motivated so it doesn't seem we're only in it for the ML aspect. Thank you! submitted by /u/Subject-Revolution-3 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I've been diving deep into the world of machine learning research, and I'm genuinely baffled: how on Earth do some researchers seem to pump out paper after paper? I mean, there's only 24 hours in a day, right? Are academic minions (i.e. PhD students) doing all the heavy lifting? Or maybe some highly efficient workflows I'm not privy to? On a more serious note, I would like a career in ML, and the sheer volume and pace of these publications is making me feel a bit disheartened. How is this prolificity possible? Any words of encouragement or advice? submitted by /u/blabboy [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Why the hell should i use cloud based or server hosted solution over a easy peasy servless variant like lancedb or even faiss vector store is enough for most of the use cases on small-medium I often see posts like "oh my stack is... pinecone Chroma weaviate_io" And they just ingest minisets of data, what the hell man submitted by /u/Dear_Bullfrog193 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I'd like to share a project that I've spent a few weekends working on. FontoGen is an autoregressive encoder-only transformer model that's capable of generating true-type fonts. GitHub: https://github.com/SerCeMan/fontogen Weights: https://huggingface.co/SerCe/fontogen Blog post with more details: https://serce.me/posts/02-10-2023-hey-computer-make-me-a-font The project is largely an exploration of whether generating fonts natively, line by line, is possible. I'm not aware of any previous research that would achieve the same results for complete fonts previously. This is my first ML-specific project, and I would appreciate any feedback on the model architecture, and I'm also happy to answer any questions you may have. submitted by /u/SerCeMan [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

The causal mask in LLaMA serves as a protective barrier to prevent information leakage. However, in certain tasks, leveraging information leakage can be a beneficial strategy for enhancing performance, particularly in tasks like token classification, such as Named Entity Recognition (NER). Interestingly, the paper titled "Label Supervised LLaMA Finetuning" (available at https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01208) reveals a significant performance boost in token classification when the causal mask is removed. submitted by /u/seanlee97 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

New paper that proposes instruction-tuning with in-context retrieval-augmentation to improve SOTA LLMs in cases where access to large, external knowledge sources is needed. Tested on LLaMA 65B, 13B and 7B. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01352 submitted by /u/todpole3 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey ML Community, I'm wondering how people currently go about scaling their Python programs? Lets say for instances you're doing batch inference using an LLM. Each prediction takes 2-3 minutes to process, how would you go about scaling that to make a million predictions? I'm asking this question because a few months back I started building a tool to quickly parallelize python functions across thousands of machines in the cloud. I'm focused on making the barrier to interact with the cloud extremely low and want to know all the core alternatives out there. Also, if you have any advice on starting a business I'd love to hear it. submitted by /u/Ok_Post_149 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I make very high quality Lora's and finetuned stable diffusion models. These models yield very good results, but more importantly they are very easy to use as I have always captioned my images as one would use natural spoken language (no weird booru tags and all that jazz). The most labor intensive processes in the workflow is image captioning. For example, my last project had almost 10000 images in the data set. Every single image was manually captioned by me as the quality of all automated solutions I tried is subpar and has too many accuracy issues. I have tried Blip auto captioning and LLava, but they still were not accurate enough for what I needed. I am hoping someone here can suggest a solution, if one exists, thanks. submitted by /u/no_witty_username [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I'm preparing for a data science interview and am looking for case study prep resources, especially for the financial domain (loans and credit cards). Mainly, I want to understand some good metrics for the financial domain, ways to break down the questions and create a rough data model, kinds of conditions to take into consideration (eg. Seasonality), kinds of effects that can be used expected (like opportunities and risks), etc. Any resources or help is greatly appreciated! submitted by /u/how_the_turn_tablez [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello, I am new to RL, I am currently working on a school project that requires it. I am working on making a model to play a game very similar to wordle, so for the function of this post it may as well be wordle. Right now I am trying to get it to work with this gym https://github.com/zach-lawless/gym-wordle, and I will make my tweaks later. This gym has a multi discrete action space, which makes sense to me for a word, IDK if thats best. To validate words, it has its own exception type. I am trying to train this with stable_baselines3, but the exception keeps being raised, since it is trying to guess garbled words like "xcjhr". Is there a way I can validate actions before they are made so the model is restricted to only guessing valid words? Is there a better way to do this? It doesnt need to be the best, it really only has to sorta work. Any help is appreciated, thanks! submitted by /u/ClackHack [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi Everyone, I'm venturing into a new territory of Reinforcement Learning (RL) through a personal project, despite having a solid background in various other ML domains. I'm developing an RL agent to play Skyjo, a turn-based card game, and I'm encountering some challenges related to reward optimization and game-ending decisions by the agents. I'd appreciate any advice or insights you might have! Project Overview: Objective: Develop an RL model to play Skyjo competitively. Environment: Built using Gymnasium and Pytorch. Agents: Two agents working in tandem - one for card selection (discard/draw) and the other for action and location selection. Training: 4-8 agent instances play against each other. Repository: https://github.com/grantslewis/auto_skyjo Reward Structure: Small p…  ( 10 min )

RANT: I've tried every possible example I can get my hands on. I've looked at reference examples. I've looked at Medium articles. I've looked at stuff written by college freshmen. Every example I find for a DQN written either for torch or tensorflow (and either tf_agents or keras), seems to either have a nasty bug preventing it to work or such a severe memory leak that it is unusable. I tried Torch recently and was doing some simple gridworlds. It does fine for tiny gridworlds like 5x5. I decided to push it a little (not much at all) to a known 21x21 gridworld from recognized papers - reference example died and ran out of memory after 3000 episodes - I mean - really? 3000 episodes? I ran on CPU and gave it 64GB. I don't know how much memory this SHOULD take. I can do it in a Q-Table for…  ( 10 min )

Hello everyone, I'm a total beginner in the reinforcement learning (RL) community, and I would appreciate some advice on a problem I'm currently facing. I've created a simple 2D turn-based game with only movement at the moment (I will also add combat features when I have success with training an AI for the movements). Game The rules are simple : A grid of 14x40 (560 cells in total) 1 Agent with a limited number of Move Point (MP) 1 Target that does not move (atm) The agent can end its turn to get its MP back I already implemented a pathfinding algorithm using A* which works really well but I would like to train an AI to reach the target as fast as possible (turn-wise). Here is a simulation of a state : ​ https://preview.redd.it/0p5yijnb60sb1.png?width=442&format=png&auto=…  ( 10 min )

submitted by /u/vwxyzjn [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Announcements Top Stories In-Depth The post DSC Weekly 3 October 2023 appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 20 min )

One of the most impressive generative AI applications I have seen is viperGPT. The image / site explains it best. The steps are: This example, earlier this year, showed the potential of multimodal LLMs And as of last week, that future is upon us ChatGPT can now see, hear & speak. What are the implications… Read More »Generative AI Megatrends: ChatGPT can see, hear and speak – but what does it mean when ChatGPT can think? The post Generative AI Megatrends: ChatGPT can see, hear and speak – but what does it mean when ChatGPT can think? appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 20 min )

In the ever-evolving landscape of the digital era, the relentless quest for deriving actionable insights from a sea of information has become the cornerstone of innovation and strategy. As businesses and organizations strive to navigate the complex corridors of big data, the spotlight invariably falls upon the expertise of data scientists, the modern-day architects of… Read More »Cracking the code: The rising demand for data scientists in various industries The post Cracking the code: The rising demand for data scientists in various industries appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 21 min )

I recently subscribed to openAI GPT4 for the OpenAI Code Interpreter/Advanced data analytics. We are using it in our class at the University of Oxford.  Its really cool and we are also waiting the multimodal openAI features Recently, a well known AI critic said that he does not see how Generative AI companies could be… Read More »Generative AI megatrends: How many LLMs would you subscribe to? The post Generative AI megatrends: How many LLMs would you subscribe to? appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 19 min )

Large language models (LLMs) for generating text and vision models for generating images are notoriously inefficient. The larger they get, the more power hungry they become.   Kisaco Research in September hosted a one-day event in Santa Clara dedicated to the topic of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) efficiency, followed by a three-day Summit on Hardware and… Read More »A few highlights of the Efficient Generative AI Summit (EGAIS) The post A few highlights of the Efficient Generative AI Summit (EGAIS) appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 21 min )

Designed to ensure safer skies, “Air-Guardian” blends human intuition with machine precision, creating a more symbiotic relationship between pilot and aircraft.  ( 8 min )

A diverse research ecosystem is essential to realizing the promise of AI. Accelerate Foundation Models Research aims to expand access to powerful models, engaging academics outside of computer science to pursue a broad range of important opportunities. The post Accelerate Foundation Models Research: Supporting a global academic research ecosystem for AI appeared first on Microsoft Research.  ( 10 min )

With the help of AI, robots, tractors and baby strollers — even skate parks — are becoming autonomous. One developer, Kabilan KB, is bringing autonomous-navigation capabilities to wheelchairs, which could help improve mobility for people with disabilities. The undergraduate from the Karunya Institute of Technology and Sciences in Coimbatore, India, is powering his autonomous wheelchair Read article >  ( 6 min )

Releasing a 3D tutorial dubbed The Easiest VFX Tutorial Ever takes supreme confidence and the skills to back it up. Steve Lund a.k.a. CG Geek — the featured artist of this week’s In the NVIDIA Studio installment — has both in spades.  ( 8 min )

Let G be a directed graph whose nodes are the positive integers and whose edges represent relations between two integers. In our first example we’ll draw an edge from x to y if x is a multiple of y. In our second example we’ll draw an edge from x to y if x ≥ y. […] From graph theory to category theory first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 6 min )

Test functions are how you can make sense of functions that aren’t really functions. The canonical example is the Dirac delta “function” that is infinite at the origin, zero everywhere else, and integrates to 1. That description is contradictory: a function that is 0 almost everywhere integrates to 0, even if you work in extended […] Test functions first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 6 min )

This article will probably only be of interest to a small number of readers. Those unfamiliar with category theory may find it bewildering, and those well versed in category theory may find it trivial. My hope is that someone in between, someone just starting to get a handle on category theory, will find it helpful. […] Groups vs Abelian groups: Pedantic or profound? first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 7 min )

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So I got an A in calculus three but I probably didn't deserve it since it was online and all I did was look up the answer and understand the problems given on the test. So I probably have a C level understanding. Will I be tested on calc 3 knowledge in machine learning or should I retake calc 3? submitted by /u/Glittering-Target-87 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello Reddit, I have a question regarding the right tool. I'm looking for a tool / model to detect hand-keypoints in a video stream of a person assembling stuff. I know OpenPose is a possible one, also Google MediaPipe. I’m not really getting along with OpenPose and MediaPipe don’t show really good results. In my project, I would like to detect hand keypoints in assembly scenarios. It would be ok to use 2 cameras or a depth camera if necessary. Does anybody knows any models / tools to use? Thanks in advance :) submitted by /u/VGHMD [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Langchain offers a wide array of vector databases for text embedding models. I need to create a vector database for around 3 million sentence embeddings, each being of dimension 384. I'm building a prototype, so it has to be local and free of charge to use. So far, I've hit limits for Chroma (41,666 max). I've also tried Redis, QDrant and FAISS - each of these gets so large that it eats up all the RAM and the process gets killed, or with QDrant, just errors out. I've used Pinecone before, but I don't really want to pay for a prototype as I have plenty of disk space. I was thinking of chunking the 3 million documents into local vector stores of size 41,666 using ChromaDB - but there isn't a whole lot out there about whether Chroma would allow me to merge all ~70 of these smaller databases into a bigger one for search. I also cannot find whether it would be possible to load all 70 of these into memory and search each one individually. So what are my options? My other thought was just creating a large Doc2Vec model, however I would like to use something more sophisticated like Huggingface embedding models. submitted by /u/russ_fegoli [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello everyone, I am struggling with prooving convergence for an optimizer which uses adaptive step-size with heavy ball algorithm for convex and non-convex functions. In some literature, I could find a regret bound analysis/proof for convex functions and proving that the estimated gradient at t -> inf goes to zero for non-convex functions. There are some assumptions and preconditions: The algorithm is heavy ball momentum with adaptive step-size. ' X_(k+1) = X_k - \eta_k . \nabla(f(x_k)) + \beta(x_k - x_(k-1)) The following assumptions are made: A. The function is smooth. B. The function is Lipschitz. C. The gradients are Lipschitz. I attempt to prove the convergence to a critical point or a local minima. Where the estimate of the gradients at any instance k goes to zero. i.e. E[\nabla(f(x_k))] = 0 as t -> inf. Could anyone please guide me through the process of convergence proof for non-convex functions or give me literature recommendations for the same. Thank you very much in advance. submitted by /u/Loose_Foundation5990 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

We all know that LLMs (and especially foundation models) are extremely functionally capable. Has anyone made a nice list of deficiencies that they show? I know Gary Marcus did so many years ago, but after GPT3 and GPT4 -- what is still unsolved? submitted by /u/Cultural-Average3959 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

According to it, increasing the hypotheses set loosens the upper bound between in-sample and out-of-sample error. ​ Can't we subdivide the hypotheses set to multiple ones, ensuring tighter bounds in general? ​ and generally, have you seen it in use before? I have seen a lot of ML projects without anybody mentioning it or anything theoretical. submitted by /u/2azo [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

So basically I have a dataset with images of vehicles in top down view in both RGB and IR, what are some models I can use for both unimodal and multimodal object detection to compare their performance. Links to GitHub repos would be helpful. Thanks submitted by /u/Xyber5 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I try to understand what are the benefits to convert DICOM images to PNG's. Context: I have DICOM images which I already extracted the useful meta-data I want to use. Those images are for a task, classification-detection pipeline of some disease. So as I already asked, what are the benefits of converting those DICOM files to PNG's rather then just using pydicom and the dicom pixel_array? Reason I ask this is because I saw many top 5 users on kaggle do this when dealing with DICOM images. If I understand how networks actually works, they get as input an array of pixels as floating point numbers no? So what's the differences between DICOM pixel_array to PNG's pixel array and numpy array or tensor? both are eventually will be fed to the network as a tensor of floating numbers. Is the reason is because PNG's are usually faster to train? Is the reason is because PNG's have more libraries support for preprocessing / augmentation / etc. ? Is the reason is because PNG's are the format many pre-trained models expect to? (I write this knowing it's 99% not true, as mentioned the tensor thing) Thanks in Advance, and Please, forgive my English (I could use AI tools to fix it but I feel addicted already) submitted by /u/01jasper [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey guys, I am wondering what kind of distribution my data are following? I want to fit a distribution function to them and use this fitted distribution function to generate new samples with a given mean and standard deviation (python). Any tips for this? Happy to hear your suggestions :) https://preview.redd.it/kdcftvpq8urb1.png?width=408&format=png&auto=webp&s=6163b9f571069e098c9e9a609c3d1cb9910fe1fb submitted by /u/Tigmib [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.17453 Github: https://github.com/mit-han-lab/streaming-llm Abstract: Deploying Large Language Models (LLMs) in streaming applications such as multi-round dialogue, where long interactions are expected, is urgently needed but poses two major challenges. Firstly, during the decoding stage, caching previous tokens' Key and Value states (KV) consumes extensive memory. Secondly, popular LLMs cannot generalize to longer texts than the training sequence length. Window attention, where only the most recent KVs are cached, is a natural approach -- but we show that it fails when the text length surpasses the cache size. We observe an interesting phenomenon, namely attention sink, that keeping the KV of initial tokens will largely recover the performance of wind…  ( 9 min )

You just give it any PyTorch model (as-is, no changes needed), and it spits out a data structure with the activations of any layer you want, along with a bunch of metadata about the model and each layer and an optional automatic visualization of the model's computational graph. I hope this greatly speeds up the process of extracting features from models for further analysis, and also serves as an aid in quickly understanding new models. I also hope it'd be helpful for teaching purposes, too. It is meant to work for any PyTorch model whatsoever and I've tested it on hundreds of models (see the "model menagerie" of visualizations below), though it's always possible I've missed some edge case or another. Hope it helps you out--I'm still actively developing it, so let me know if there's anything on your wishlist! https://preview.redd.it/k37nhejvxtrb1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=5713a8711110644794e2264d84dd479ede861c5e GitHub Repo Twitter Thread Paper CoLab Tutorial Gallery of Model Visuals submitted by /u/therealjmt91 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Transformers have been the new kid on the block, easy to see why with LLMs and and sequential output generation, but I still don't know why vision transformers based on ViT are so hot in the field right now. From my understanding, CNNs are just vastly better than transformers for vision tasks, as its inductive biases allows it to determine the relationship between neighboring features of an image via pooling and filters. However, transformers don't have this kind of inductive bias, and as a result, take much more data and compute to reach similar levels of performance. I read this survey paper on Vision Transformers here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.12556.pdf, which has the performance of CNNs vs various transformer models for CV. Comparing even the best vision transformers to the classic …  ( 10 min )

When trying to get language models to solve complex math problems, researchers kept running into limits. Models like GPT-3 and ChatGPT still struggle with advanced algebra, calculus, and geometry questions. The math is just too abstract and symbol-heavy for them. To break through this barrier, researchers from Tsinghua University and Microsoft taught models to combine natural language reasoning with calling external math tools. The key is their new "tool-integrated reasoning" format. Models generate a natural language plan first, then write code to invoke tools like SymPy to solve equations. They take the output results and continue verbal reasoning. By interleaving natural language and symbolic computations, they get the best of both worlds - semantic understanding from language models and rigorous math from tools. They trained versions of the LLaMA model this way, producing their Tool-Integrated Reasoning Agent (TORA). They present some strong results: In evaluations on 10 math datasets, TORA substantially outperformed prior state-of-the-art methods, achieving 13-19% higher accuracy on average. On one competition test, TORA-7B scored 40% accuracy, beating the previous best model by 22 percentage points. This demonstrates that integrating tools directly into the reasoning process can significantly enhance mathematical capabilities, even for large models like GPT-4. However, tough problems involving geometry and advanced algebra are still there. New techniques for symbolic reasoning and spatial understanding will likely be needed to push further. Overall though, tool integration seems a promising path to improve reasoning skills. Applying this to other domains like logic and programming could also be impactful. TLDR: Teaching language models to use math tools helps them solve way more complex problems. Full Paper Summary arXiv Link submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello everyone, We've begun gathering a variety of AI coding tools used in one place to make things easier for everyone. We're inviting everyone to check out our collection, and maybe even add tools you find useful. You can find the repository here: https://github.com/gaborsoter/awesome-ai-dev-productivity Feel free to explore and contribute! submitted by /u/BootstrapGuy [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

We developed a statistical model to estimate “How many unique identities can a generative face model generate?” without exhaustively generating a lot of faces. Abstract: There has been tremendous progress in generating realistic faces with high fidelity over the past few years. Despite this progress, a crucial question remains unanswered: “Given a generative face model, how many unique identities can it generate?” In other words, what is the biometric capacity of the generative face model? A scientific basis for answering this question will benefit evaluating and comparing different generative face models and establish an upper bound on their scalability. This paper proposes a statistical approach to estimate the biometric capacity of generated face images in a hyperspherical feature space. We employ our approach on multiple generative models, including unconditional generators like StyleGAN, Latent Diffusion Model, and “Generated Photos,” as well as DCFace, a class-conditional generator. We also estimate capacity w.r.t. demographic attributes such as gender and age. Our capacity estimates indicate that (a) under ArcFace representation at a false acceptance rate (FAR) of 0.1%, StyleGAN3 and DCFace have a capacity upper bound of 1.43 million and 11,900, respectively; (b) the capacity reduces drastically as we lower the desired FAR with an estimate of 17,960 and 562 at FAR of 1% and 10%, respectively, for StyleGAN3; (c) there is no discernible disparity in the capacity w.r.t gender; and (d) for some generative models, there is an appreciable disparity in the capacity w.r.t age. Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:2308.02065 Code: https://github.com/human-analysis/capacity-generative-face-models submitted by /u/VishDev [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I'm a machine learning engineer and researcher. I got fed up with how difficult it is to understand why neural networks behave the way they do, so i wrote a library to help with it. Comgra (computation graph analysis) is a library you can use with pytorch to extract all the tensor data you care about and visualize it graphically in a browser. This allows for a much more detailed analysis of what is happening than the usual approach of using tensorboard. You can go investigate tensors as training proceeds, drill down into individual neurons, inspect single data sets that are of special interest to you, track gradients, compare statistics between different training runs, and more. This tool has saved me a ton of time in my research by letting me check my hypotheses much more quickly than normal and by helping me understand how the different parts of my network really interact. I first published this a month ago and have made some improvements since then. I would be happy to hear even more feedback! My goal is to make this the go-to library used both by novices who want to understand what's going on under the hood, and by researchers in neural architecture design. submitted by /u/Smart-Emu5581 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hugging Face Transformers is a complete audio toolkit that provides state-of-the-art models for all audio tasks, including TTS, ASR, audio embeddings, audio classification and music generation. All you need to do is install the Transformers package: pip install --upgrade transformers And then all of these models can be used in just 3 lines of code: ​ TTS Example usage: from transformers import pipeline generator = pipeline("text-to-speech", model="suno/bark-small") speech = generator("Hey - it's Hugging Face on the phone!") Available models: Bark https://huggingface.co/suno/bark MMS TTS https://huggingface.co/facebook/mms-tts-eng VITS https://huggingface.co/kakao-enterprise/vits-vctk SpeechT5 https://huggingface.co/microsoft/speecht5_tts And more! https://huggingface.co/mo…  ( 9 min )

Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.17421 Youtube: https://youtu.be/Q0pP782dSh0?si=MiJAlK5k-KEyQ-Zr Abstract: Large multimodal models (LMMs) extend large language models (LLMs) with multi-sensory skills, such as visual understanding, to achieve stronger generic intelligence. In this paper, we analyze the latest model, GPT-4V(ision), to deepen the understanding of LMMs. The analysis focuses on the intriguing tasks that GPT-4V can perform, containing test samples to probe the quality and genericity of GPT-4V's capabilities, its supported inputs and working modes, and the effective ways to prompt the model. In our approach to exploring GPT-4V, we curate and organize a collection of carefully designed qualitative samples spanning a variety of domains and tasks. Observations from these samples demonstrate that GPT-4V's unprecedented ability in processing arbitrarily interleaved multimodal inputs and the genericity of its capabilities together make GPT-4V a powerful multimodal generalist system. Furthermore, GPT-4V's unique capability of understanding visual markers drawn on input images can give rise to new human-computer interaction methods such as visual referring prompting. We conclude the report with in-depth discussions on the emerging application scenarios and the future research directions for GPT-4V-based systems. We hope that this preliminary exploration will inspire future research on the next-generation multimodal task formulation, new ways to exploit and enhance LMMs to solve real-world problems, and gaining better understanding of multimodal foundation models. https://preview.redd.it/qkytzg2rjqrb1.jpg?width=511&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fc306dc6ae64100e993639f8e27583b809bf8a5c https://preview.redd.it/z4kq0l2rjqrb1.jpg?width=507&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d4fda59456846fa7a6c9b318b21fc9c544bd2b68 https://preview.redd.it/1ptrkk2rjqrb1.jpg?width=712&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2b44fbc949e76fdf20d05b1236f56c87ba5efece ​ ​ submitted by /u/Singularian2501 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi, i'm trying to replicate at least some of the success of Phi 1.5 on a model 10x smaller, gpt-2 124m. I have started with model finetuning, and have a simple github with roadmap, https://github.com/VatsaDev/NanoPhi, check it out there! submitted by /u/vatsadev [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Today, we are excited to announce Code Llama foundation models, developed by Meta, are available for customers through Amazon SageMaker JumpStart to deploy with one click for running inference. Code Llama is a state-of-the-art large language model (LLM) capable of generating code and natural language about code from both code and natural language prompts. Code […]  ( 11 min )

A successful deployment of a machine learning (ML) model in a production environment heavily relies on an end-to-end ML pipeline. Although developing such a pipeline can be challenging, it becomes even more complex when dealing with an edge ML use case. Machine learning at the edge is a concept that brings the capability of running […]  ( 10 min )

In Part 1 of this series, we drafted an architecture for an end-to-end MLOps pipeline for a visual quality inspection use case at the edge. It is architected to automate the entire machine learning (ML) process, from data labeling to model training and deployment at the edge. The focus on managed and serverless services reduces […]  ( 9 min )

This is Part 3 of our series where we design and implement an MLOps pipeline for visual quality inspection at the edge. In this post, we focus on how to automate the edge deployment part of the end-to-end MLOps pipeline. We show you how to use AWS IoT Greengrass to manage model inference at the […]  ( 9 min )

Many other students in my research institution are pretty worried after ChatGPT / LLMs about continuing work in RL and are thinking of leaving the field. What are main the open problems in RL after LLMs and S4 can solve a hefty chunk of sequence learning problems? submitted by /u/Cultural-Average3959 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

If I already have a trained reward model, say a sentiment classification model, that I'd like to use for PPO-based RLHF, I believe the standard method would be to instantiate the Critic/value function using the reward model, and train it further during PPO, correct? Would it even make sense to try PPO for RLHF without using the GAE term and thus without the value function, and just directly using the reward model's output as the advantage? It seems that this would be require viewing the entire generation as a single action (rather than each token's generation as an action), but most of the articles I've read on RLHF seem to treat it that way. On the other hand, all the code implementations I've seen have an Actor-Critic model producing values at each token, which I think implies that each token is an action. Edit: Apologies if any of this is just me having fundamental gaps in my understanding! submitted by /u/ganzzahl [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

So I am trying to find NE using rl algorithms for a turn based deterministic graph pursuit game. I have a way of checking if the strategies of players 1,2,3 are a NE and thought of using Q-Learning and see if it converges to a NE. Thus far it doesnt seem to work and I wonder if I made a mistake. The state is described as: St = [x1 x2 x3 p] where current player is p and x1,x2,x3 are the locations of the players in the graph Players have value functions Q^1(St), Q^2(St), Q^3(St) The way I update my value function is: player i choose e-greedy action a_t and the new state St_new Q^i(St) = (1-alpha)*Q^i(St)+alpha*gamma*Q(St_new) I have tried using a memory buffer but I havent improve the convergence success. I check if the if the values are a NE every 1000 iterations. It only converges for simple graphs. Do you think the way I update my value function is correct? Do you have any other traditional algorithms to suggest? Shall I move to deep learning? I am worried if simple algorithms cant converge the neural networks wont either... I tried to implemenet Nash Q learning following the paper:https://www.jmlr.org/papers/volume4/hu03a/hu03a.pdf but I am not sure if implemented correctly for a turn based game submitted by /u/__gp_ [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/Senior_tasteey [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Artificial intelligence (AI) anxiety is on the rise, but there are ways to manage it. While AI may outperform humans in certain tasks, humans are not yet headed for all-out replacement. Recent research shows that AI programs scored higher than humans in tasks requiring originality, but the highest-rated human ideas were still considered more creative. The rise of generative AI tools in industries like animation has left some professionals anxious about the future of their work. Experts suggest managing AI fears by understanding the historical context of technological advancements and focusing on the benefits and training opportunities that AI brings. Source : https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-anxiety-is-on-the-rise-heres-how-to-manage-it/ submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

When trying to get language models to solve complex math problems, researchers kept running into limits. Models like GPT-3 and ChatGPT still struggle with advanced algebra, calculus, and geometry questions. The math is just too abstract and symbol-heavy for them. To break through this barrier, researchers from Tsinghua University and Microsoft taught models to combine natural language reasoning with calling external math tools. The key is their new "tool-integrated reasoning" format. Models generate a natural language plan first, then write code to invoke tools like SymPy to solve equations. They take the output results and continue verbal reasoning. By interleaving natural language and symbolic computations, they get the best of both worlds - semantic understanding from language models and rigorous math from tools. They trained versions of the LLaMA model this way, producing their Tool-Integrated Reasoning Agent (TORA). They present some strong results: In evaluations on 10 math datasets, TORA substantially outperformed prior state-of-the-art methods, achieving 13-19% higher accuracy on average. On one competition test, TORA-7B scored 40% accuracy, beating the previous best model by 22 percentage points. This demonstrates that integrating tools directly into the reasoning process can significantly enhance mathematical capabilities, even for large models like GPT-4. However, tough problems involving geometry and advanced algebra are still there. New techniques for symbolic reasoning and spatial understanding will likely be needed to push further. Overall though, tool integration seems a promising path to improve reasoning skills. Applying this to other domains like logic and programming could also be impactful. TLDR: Teaching language models to use math tools helps them solve way more complex problems. Full Paper Summary arXiv Link submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

To fast-track AI morality to surpass human ability by 2025, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other developers could: Invest heavily in AI ethics research and development.** For example, Google AI has launched the Responsible AI Research and Development (RAIR) program, which is focused on developing new AI ethics research and tools. Create large-scale datasets of human moral reasoning.** For example, OpenAI has released the Moral Machine dataset, which contains over 1 million crowdsourced responses to moral dilemmas. Develop new AI architectures that are specifically designed for moral reasoning.** For example, Anthropic is developing a new AI architecture called "Moral Machine Learning," which is designed to learn from human moral reasoning data. Establish a global AI ethics research consortium and create a public database of human moral reasoning datasets.** For example, the Partnership on AI has launched the Safeguarding AI initiative, which is working to develop new safety mechanisms for AI systems. Fund research into developing new AI architectures for moral reasoning and develop new AI evaluation metrics for moral performance.** For example, the Moral Machine project is developing new evaluation metrics for AI systems' moral performance. By working together, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other developers can help to fast-track AI morality and create AI systems that are more moral than humans. (199 words) submitted by /u/Georgeo57 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/Einsof__ [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Is propt engineering a legit job ?? Is it here to stay ? Is it worth studying ? Best way to study it , land a job or freelancing ? submitted by /u/metasubcon [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

How does one make videos like on this Instagram page? It's unreal. https://instagram.com/nostalgicraindrops?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA== submitted by /u/CK1886 [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

submitted by /u/Senior_tasteey [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Every day, new AI tools appear. There are also AI tools designed to make students' lives easier—from AI essay generators to study organizers. While there are many directories with AI tools, they are often not well-sorted for students. So, I've compiled a list of my favorite AI tools for educational purposes. AI tool How to use for studies Bing Chat - Writing excel formulas - Making graphs and charts - Answers for homework assignments - Researching for a paper Textero.ai - Search for relevant academic sources for essays - Research assistance with the "Ask AI" feature - Essay generation and paper formatting - Structured essay outline creation - Summarizing of texts ChatPDF - Interacting with academic PDFs - Asking specific questions about the content - Quickly locating essential data for assignments Socratic - Breaking down complex homework questions - Providing step-by-step educational guidance - Safe and interactive learning Writely AI - Improving grammar and writing clarity - Creating concise study notes - Feedback for content quality Turnitin - Checking for copied content - Comparing against a vast academic database - Highlighting potential plagiarism Got any to add to the list? Let's share and help each other! submitted by /u/loyallyUrticate [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/Grindmaster_Flash [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Meta Platforms recently introduced Llama 2 Long, a revolutionary AI model that outperforms top competitors with its ability to generate accurate responses to long user queries. For the latest advancements in AI, look here first. https://preview.redd.it/geqqd3k5rprb1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=e72a67fc7ef7e85902169f3061529c136beadc87 Meta's new AI model As an enhancement of the original Llama 2, Llama 2 Long deals with larger data containing longer texts and is modified to handle lengthier information sequences. Its stellar performance outshines other models such as OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo and Claude 2. How Llama 2 Long works Meta built different versions of Llama 2, ranging from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters, which refines its learning from data. Llama 2 Long employs Rotary Positional Embedding (RoPE) technique, refining the way it encodes the position of each token, allowing fewer data and memory to produce precise responses. The model further fine-tunes its performance using reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and synthetic data generated by Llama 2 chat itself. Impressive feats and future aspirations Llama 2 Long can create high-quality responses to user prompts up to 200,000 characters long, which is approximately 40 pages of text. Its ability to generate responses to queries on diverse topics such as history, science, literature, and sports indicates its potential to cater to complex and various user needs. The researchers see Llama 2 Long as a step towards broader, more adaptable AI models, and advocate for more research and dialogue to harness these models responsibly and beneficially. (source) P.S. If you like this kind of analysis, I write a free newsletter that tracks the most relevant news and developments in AI. Professionals from Meta, Google, and OpenAI are already reading it. submitted by /u/AIsupercharged [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I've recently tried Canva and Dall-E to generate an image that references two popular games, Dark Souls 3 and Baldur's Gate 3. And they both fall on their face. Maybe my prompt is bad but Canva is not getting me what I want. Dall-E ran out of free credits. Do you guys have any recommendations. Midjourney is no longer free now. I would like this to be free and has good references to popular culture. submitted by /u/livingroomsessions [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

In September, I received the DAGM MVTec dissertation award 2023 for my PhD thesis. DAGM is the German association for pattern recognition and organizes the German Conference on Pattern Recognition (GCPR) which is Germany's prime conference for computer vision and related research areas. I feel particularly honored by this award since my academic career started with my first paper published as part of the young researcher forum at GCPR 2015 in Aachen. The post Awarded DAGM MVTec Dissertation Award 2023 appeared first on David Stutz.  ( 3 min )

The Depths of Wikipedia twitter account posted a screenshot about supereggs that’s popular at the moment. It says there’s no way this is real. they must be making these words up above a screenshot from the Wikipedia article on supereggs saying The definition can be changed to have an equality rather than an inequality; this […] Supereggs, squigonometry, and squircles first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

Meredith Whittaker posted on Twitter that In addition to being the best in privacy, Signal is also the best in not subjecting you to corny ‘AI’ features no one asked for or wants. I love the phrase “corny AI.” That’s exactly what a lot of AI features are. “Would you like help composing that tweet?” […] Corny AI first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

The star-like image above is today’s exponential sum. The exponential sum page on my site generates a new image each day by putting the numbers of the day’s month, day, and year into the equation and connecting the partial sums in the complex plane. Here m is the month, d is the day, and y […] Today’s star first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

By focusing on causal relationships in genome regulation, a new AI method could help scientists identify new immunotherapy techniques or regenerative therapies.  ( 10 min )

Study shows users can be primed to believe certain things about an AI chatbot’s motives, which influences their interactions with the chatbot.  ( 10 min )

submitted by /u/plutoandmal [link] [comments]  ( 8 min )

Posted by Shaina Mehta, Program Manager, Google Google is proud to be a Platinum Sponsor of the International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV 2023), a premier annual conference, which is being held this week in Paris, France. As a leader in computer vision research, Google has a strong presence at this year’s conference with 60 accepted papers and active involvement in 27 workshops and tutorials. Google is also proud to be a Platinum Sponsor for the LatinX in CV workshop. We look forward to sharing some of our extensive computer vision research and expanding our partnership with the broader research community. Attending ICCV 2023? We hope you’ll visit the Google booth to chat with researchers who are actively pursuing the latest innovations in computer vision, and check out som…  ( 94 min )

If an AI were to take on this task, it would primarily rely on data mining and natural language processing (NLP) techniques. First, the AI would scrape digital platforms to collect works authored by various people. Platforms could range from academic databases like PubMed or ArXiv to blogs, forums, and social media. The goal would be to capture a wide array of intellectual output, irrespective of the person's titles or accolades. Next, an NLP model would evaluate the collected content based on factors like originality, complexity, and coherence. Advanced sentiment analysis could be employed to gauge the depth of understanding and nuances in the arguments made. Specialized algorithms could also be developed to assess the impact of each piece of work, using metrics such as citations, social shares, or subsequent works that build upon it. The AI would then create a shortlist based on these evaluations. This stage might also involve unsupervised machine learning techniques like clustering to find patterns or commonalities among the top contenders. The final stage would be validation, possibly using reinforcement learning. The AI could simulate various scenarios or problems and predict how the content created by these individuals would contribute to solving them. It would then refine its list based on the simulated outcomes. This all-AI approach would drastically reduce human bias and could be executed relatively quickly. However, it's important to note that any such system would need to be designed carefully to avoid introducing biases present in the training data or algorithms. submitted by /u/Georgeo57 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/bharath_brt [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Big Tech's dominance in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry is growing as start-ups like Anthropic rely on their computing power and resources. Despite creating breakthrough AI technology, these start-ups still need the support of Big Tech to scale and succeed. The training of AI systems is expensive and requires specialized computer chips and data centers, which are mostly controlled by Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Regulators, including the Federal Trade Commission and French competition authorities, are monitoring the industry for signs of anticompetitive behavior. Some business leaders believe that competition and efficiency will eventually drive down the cost of running AI models. Source : https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/30/anthropic-amazon-artificial-intelligence/ submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

A strong data strategy is crucial for the success of any AI strategy. Generative AI use cases depend on a healthy data infrastructure, including data governance, observability, catalog, data sharing, and lineage. Many enterprises lack the necessary data infrastructure to deploy customer-facing AI apps confidently. Poor data strategy and infrastructure can derail generative AI efforts. Existing issues with data ecosystems, such as data silos and poor data governance, will have a greater impact on generative AI workloads than new issues. Data silos, poor data discoverability, and the lack of data interoperability can become serious bottlenecks for generative AI apps. Source : https://nextword.substack.com/p/data-strategy-matters-for-generative submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Same as title submitted by /u/No-Educator-59 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

When visualizing the inner workings of vision transformers (ViTs), researchers noticed weird spikes of attention on random background patches. This didn't make sense since the models should focus on foreground objects. By analyzing the output embeddings, they found a small number of tokens (2%) had super high vector norms, causing the spikes. The high-norm "outlier" tokens occurred in redundant areas and held less local info but more global info about the image. Their hypothesis is that ViTs learn to identify unimportant patches and recycle them as temporary storage instead of discarding. This enables efficient processing but causes issues. Their fix is simple - just add dedicated "register" tokens that provide storage space, avoiding the recycling side effects. Models trained with registers have: Smoother and more meaningful attention maps Small boosts in downstream performance Way better object discovery abilities The registers give ViTs a place to do their temporary computations without messing stuff up. Just a tiny architecture tweak improves interpretability and performance. Sweet! I think it's cool how they reverse-engineered this model artifact and fixed it with such a small change. More work like this will keep incrementally improving ViTs. TLDR: Vision transformers recycle useless patches to store data, causing problems. Adding dedicated register tokens for storage fixes it nicely. Full summary. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/Senior_tasteey [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Microsoft Researchers Introduce AutoGen: An Artificial Intelligence Framework for Simplifying the Orchestration, Optimization, and Automation of LLM Workflows.[1] StoriaBoard helps filmmakers, marketers and other storytellers pre-visualize stories. Simply upload your script, select a visual style, and generate hundreds of frames in seconds.[2] Will Hurd Releases A.I. Plan, a First in the Republican Presidential Field.[3] Sam Altman says AI systems will automate some tasks but also lead to ‘new and much better jobs’.[4] Sources: [1] https://www.marktechpost.com/2023/09/30/microsoft-researchers-introduce-autogen-an-artificial-intelligence-framework-for-simplifying-the-orchestration-optimization-and-automation-of-llm-workflows/?amp [2] https://www.producthunt.com/posts/storiaboard [3] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/20/us/politics/will-hurd-ai-plan.html [4] https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-sam-altman-ai-will-automate-tasks-create-better-jobs-2023-9?amp submitted by /u/Excellent-Target-847 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/ApprehensiveChair460 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

What is everyone’s thoughts on the reliablity of the quizlet AI? I just talked to a friend and she said that she uses the AI to study with quizlet. submitted by /u/immickle [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/CellWithoutCulture [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Prompt engineering frequently involves trying to encode very specific behaviors into a model to steer it a certain direction. In practice, as requirements become more complex, you often end up with fairly lengthy prompts, especially when using methods like RAG. I was wondering, how effective are LLMs at following instructions as the system prompt grows in size and complexity? I did some quick experiments on this and found that, unsurprisingly, GPT-4 can follow a lot of rules (up to 50) quite accurately. But even GPT-3.5 slowly degrades and Llama-2-70b-chat starts to fail after just a few rules. Comparison of performance metrics over increasing rule counts, demonstrating GPT-4's consistent performance and a decline in accuracy for GPT-3.5 and Llama-2-70b-chat. These results are based on …  ( 10 min )

Due to challenges such as hallucination, detecting errors in the output of a given prompt becomes an important challenge. LangDiversity is an implementation of "diversity measures" that are domain independent and can be used to measure the uncertainty in the result of a language model. Type pip install langdiversity Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86J_K9mR7lw Web: https://neurosymbolic.asu.edu/llm-correction/ Visit https://github.com/lab-v2/langdiversity Read the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.11189 https://preview.redd.it/rb0xg1ly8nrb1.png?width=1021&format=png&auto=webp&s=8e57056d24327ca2987abea12a7a9066a825738b submitted by /u/Neurosymbolic [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

We want to run (not train, i.e. think single forward pass only) an ML algorithm on a machine with very limited resources. Which model could we use to show off the possibilities? If the benchmark is an MLP for binary image classification, what else could we do with a similar scale of operations? E.g. Which model is the simplest for e.g. text-to-image generation? Any other ML models that are simple enough to run and if initialized with good params, does something impressive submitted by /u/2i2i_tokenized_time [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/davidbun [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I've been using Perplexity.ai for a bit now when it hit me that I don't understand how they can sustain their business model with search. Stuff like Bing search and Google search cost around $5 or more per 1000 searches, so how can they even afford to do this kind of search. Do they have their own search index. Also, I don't know how they pull in the data from these sources so fast? I've played around with some things like this with Langchain with retrieval, but the speed of splitting and tokenizing website html is not very fast. Have they already pre-scrapped the websites from the search results and tokenized them for LLM retrieval? submitted by /u/dragon18456 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Guys, i am currently working building a project, there are certain tasks like building a ml model using certain use-cases. I wish to automate this task, do u think metagpt is a good fit for the same. Let me know if you need any further information!! EDIT: One of the tasks my app needs to do is to convert image to text (aim to implement image captioning). So, if i give metaGPT the requirements for my project, is it possible it will give me the code which I need. I need to save certain tasks here so that I can focus more on operation and design side. Edit: it seems, such kind of vague questions are not encouraged on this platform, I will work and will straigh away ask questions which are quite good and meet the standards of this platform. Thanks!! Thanks!! Always have a massive respect for this community!! submitted by /u/aristotleTheFake [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

When visualizing the inner workings of vision transformers (ViTs), researchers noticed weird spikes of attention on random background patches. This didn't make sense since the models should focus on foreground objects. By analyzing the output embeddings, they found a small number of tokens (2%) had super high vector norms, causing the spikes. The high-norm "outlier" tokens occurred in redundant areas and held less local info but more global info about the image. Their hypothesis is that ViTs learn to identify unimportant patches and recycle them as temporary storage instead of discarding. This enables efficient processing but causes issues. Their fix is simple - just add dedicated "register" tokens that provide storage space, avoiding the recycling side effects. Models trained with registers have: Smoother and more meaningful attention maps Small boosts in downstream performance Way better object discovery abilities The registers give ViTs a place to do their temporary computations without messing stuff up. Just a tiny architecture tweak improves interpretability and performance. Sweet! I think it's cool how they reverse-engineered this model artifact and fixed it with such a small change. More work like this will keep incrementally improving ViTs. TLDR: Vision transformers recycle useless patches to store data, causing problems. Adding dedicated register tokens for storage fixes it nicely. Full summary. Paper is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/waterstrider123 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

There's some evidence [1] [2] that it's possible to run text2text language model at substantially (potentially on the order of magnitude) better inference speed by keeping the decoder shallow. I'm curious whether some general reasoner SOTA (small model for machine translation available at [3]) style models are publicly available for this sort of thing. If not, how would one go about training one? Would it be necessary to do it entirely from scratch (extremely costly)? Or would it be possible to take, say, Flan-UL2 (20B), chop off its decoder, and train a much smaller decoder on top of it with the UL2 encoder frozen (ie how one trains adapter layers). Assuming the decoder hyperparameters are kept small, would this be possible within reasonable compute budget? Would that even meaningfully converge with small amount of compute (assuming same training objective as is for UL2)? Would the strength (ie somewhat comparable to 10B if we cut 20B in half) transfer from the SOTA encoder, or would cutting off half of the model layers kneecap it too badly? [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.10369.pdf [2] https://aclanthology.org/2023.sustainlp-1.6.pdf [3] https://github.com/snoop2head/Deep-Encoder-Shallow-Decoder submitted by /u/upalse [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Is there any notable work on duplicating layers in large feed forward models? In contrast to e.g. the brain which is essentially a directed graph most networks utilized nowerdays use a feed forward approach. E.g. transformers are able to attend to past tokens, but generate the tokens in a way where for a given token a given weight is not utilized at different stages in the feed forward pass. In my intuition this would lead to an issue where concepts (factual data as well as learned "algorithms") might be duplicated as they are needed at different depths in the generation process and are sequentially dependent on one another. This does not directly make the model less capable, as it might learn the same concept at two layers sufficiently well, but it reduces the data and parameter efficiency and and might impact generalization capabilities. Using a full on brain like graph might be hard to implement/optimize/scale on current hardware and is tricky with the backprop. But is there any work on duplicating a few layers, placing them at different depths in large models. I would guess that this would be more impactful for large models. One would essentially trade compute for better data efficiency. submitted by /u/floriv1999 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I couldn't find any AI sub dedicated to audio, so I’ve created r/AudioAI to serve as a hub for everything at the intersection of artificial intelligence and the world of sounds. AI-driven music, speech, audio production, and all other AI audio technologies. If anyone wants to be part of mod, let me know! submitted by /u/chibop1 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Due to challenges such as hallucination, detecting errors in the output of a given prompt becomes an important challenge. LangDiversity is an implementation of "diversity measures" that are domain independent and can be used to measure the uncertainty in the result of a language model. ​ Type pip install langdiversity Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86J_K9mR7lw Web: https://neurosymbolic.asu.edu/llm-correction/ Visit https://github.com/lab-v2/langdiversity Read the paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.11189 https://preview.redd.it/o0v8p9g7tmrb1.png?width=1021&format=png&auto=webp&s=ff1ac672b61f96e4669663410769127066a0674d submitted by /u/Neurosymbolic [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

" Bio education below *. Summarization: ~1000 IO neurons attach math regions to conscious regions, low cost 1000-electrod microprocessors can run on radio. * https://youtube.com/watch?v=bhp2CkNDxME Don't want for self; want for professors and humans who program KUKA's/FANUC's for construction, and for who do calculations/optimizations for CUDA, MS Visual Studio and such, but what go up for experimentation should funds allow." sounds fun submitted by /u/2002LuvAbbaLuvU [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello everyone! A while back, I stumbled upon an interesting paper that applied Reinforcement Learning to Object Localization. I got fascinated by how computer vision tasks could be transformed into a reinforcement learning problem, making it feel like a Markov decision process ! So, i've decided to create a repository to compile all the existing (published) papers that delve into Reinforcement Learning in Computer Vision : https://github.com/rayanramoul/RLCV-Papers If you have any papers in mind or recommendations to enhance the repository, please don't hesitate to share them. Your input would be greatly appreciated! Thank you! :) submitted by /u/raysamram [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

The environment of the Clean Up game is simple: in a 25*18 grid world, there's dirt spawning on the left side and apples spawning on the other. Agents get a +1 reward for eating an apple (by stepping onto it). Agents clean the dirt also by stepping on it (no reward). Agent can go up, down, left, right. The game goes on for 1000 steps. Apple's spawn probability depends on the amount of dirt (less dirt, higher the probability). Currently, the observation for each agent has the manhatten distance to their closest apple and dirt. I have tried multiple ways of training this, including changing the observation space of the agents. But it seems the result does not outperform random agents by any significant amount. The network is simple, it tries to take in all the observations for all the agen…  ( 10 min )

We must move beyond just taming…to monetizing Language Models! In part 1 of this series on Small Language Models (“Use Case Language Models: Taming the LLM Beast – Part 1”), I explored the business and operational value of Use Case-specific Small Language Models (Use Case Language Models). Use case language models are trained or adapted… Read More »Entity Language Models: Monetizing Language Models – Part 2 The post Entity Language Models: Monetizing Language Models – Part 2 appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 23 min )

Since 2019 I've generated October drawing prompts using the year's most state-of-the-art text-generating models. Every year the challenges are different, but this was one of the hardest years yet. Large language models like chatgpt, GPT-4, Bing Chat, and Bard, are all tweaked to produce generic, predictable  ( 6 min )

AI Weirdness: the strange side of machine learning  ( 2 min )

I am working on a telecom dataset where I need to fit a model to for predicting churn(yes or no). There are a lot of categorical data with missing values( total values 7043). What is the best way to handle missing data in this case, is it better to ignore it or any other better imputation method? Data columns (total 21 columns): customerID 7043 non-null object gender 7043 non-null object Age 7043 non-null int64 Partner 7043 non-null object Dependents 7043 non-null object tenure 7043 non-null int64 PhoneService 7043 non-null object MultipleLines 6500 non-null object InternetService 6500 non-null object OnlineSecurity 7043 non-null object OnlineBackup 7043 non-null object DeviceProtection 7043 non-null object TechSupport 7043 non-null object StreamingTV 6500 non-null object StreamingMovies 6500 non-null object Contract 6500 non-null object PaperlessBilling 7043 non-null object PaymentMethod 6500 non-null object MonthlyCharges 7043 non-null float64 TotalCharges 7043 non-null object Churn 7043 non-null object submitted by /u/guyloveskissing [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

How, outside of testing, do you estimate how quickly a specific model will run on some hardware? Anything about time is rarely mentioned in papers and if it is, it's more likely to talk about training, unless authors are specifically proud of their speed (like YOLO). Even less so in any README. Some way to translate numbers of parameters into seconds on a given GPU/CPU, any rules of thumb better than just setting up everything every time? submitted by /u/teleoflexuous [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I'm fairly new to the Al domain. I've decent python knowledge. I've gone through a lot of YouTube tutorials and got stuck in the tutorial hell. After struggling through hours of videos came here as my only last hope !!. How do I begin? What python frameworks should I learn? Which particular books should I refer ? submitted by /u/Dry_Ad_3887 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Edit: I am a USA citizen so no need for sponsorship. I have 4 yoe in a start up company and a phd four publications 2 in high level math journals and 2 CV/DL papers in A journals and also 4 patents. I have experience with most common Cv tasks eg object detection, Multi object tracking, 2d/3d human pose estimation and monocular depth estimation. I’m well versed in typical network building blocks eg conv nets, FFNs, transformers, Diffusion etc. I have a little experience with NLP like NLTK and TTS networks. Also some other general dev technologies like ec2,s3,sql,mongoose, etc. That all being said I can’t seem to even get interviews these days just straight rejections not talking to recruiters. On the other hand in 2020, I was just searching for jobs passively and had something like a 75% success rate with getting interviews. I know the job market has changed but I’m a lot more experienced at this time than then and having abysmal luck. Anyone have any advice would be happy to share my resume if that would make it easier to give advice. Also open to hearing what other technologies o should/could learn. submitted by /u/AbjectDrink3276 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Every Friday for the past few months we’ve been hosting a public paper club called “Arxiv Dives”. We pick a paper and dive deep into it and chat about it as a group. There are a lot of gems of knowledge hidden in these research papers, and the main motivation is simply to keep up with most impactful techniques in the field by taking the time to dive in and discuss. The attendees so far have been great, and would love for anyone is interested to join! https://lu.ma/oxenbookclub submitted by /u/FallMindless3563 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi, New to ML, I can't find a clear answer to this question. I find references online to a 1.8 trillion parameter model taking up the computational power of a 10B model, yet I also hear that the memory requirements a lot higher for an MoE? If I was interested in training/inferencing, for example, a 15M dense model, or a 60M MoE with 4 15M experts. whats the difference gonna be? submitted by /u/vatsadev [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I’m new to AI/ML and my understanding is that (1) LLMs are SOTA in many tasks, and their short comings, such as ~70% accuracy, hallucinations, inability to learn from small samples etc, are well known. (2) Neuro-symbolic approaches are apparently the way to get accuracy to 100% and solve other shortcomings. So question is (3) What are the promising research in LLMs+Symbolic architectures? (4) And how close is it to production, rather than academic? (5) Do we need non-LLM based architectures instead? submitted by /u/reeldeele [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I'm absolute beginner in Machine Learning. Me and My team are building a Chat Bot that recommends medicine based on symptoms, for that we are fine tuning LLAMA 2. Uploading BOOKS to train and we will ask question based on that books. SomeHow I got code on github to FineTune LLAMA 2. But how can I Integrate in my website ? How to connect it in my web app. Need some guidance. We have submission in 2 weeks. If anyone is willing to mentor us in this project or just guide what to do. submitted by /u/BookAny3024 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I have some data - twitter description of an event in text and the event itself. If I have 100000 tweets in column X and a category in Y - e.g sporting event review, movie review, news, etc what is the best algorithm to match them. Should I make the description a bag of words and depending on the word frequency I can train a ML model (random forest,svm,etc.) or can the algorithm take into account the order. submitted by /u/AnyJello605 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello, The Mistral 7b AI model beats LLaMA 2 7b on all benchmarks and LLaMA 2 13b in many benchmarks. It is actually even on par with the LLaMA 1 34b model. So I made a quick video about how to deploy this model on an A10 GPU on an AWS EC2 g5.4xlarge instance: https://nlpcloud.com/deploy-mistral-7b-on-a10-gpu-on-aws.html I hope it will be useful. If you have recommendations about how to improve this video please don't hesitate to let me know, that will be very much appreciated! Julien submitted by /u/juliensalinas [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am reading PaLI: A Jointly-Scaled Multilingual Language-Image Model . In their table 2 (page 6), it's reported that Thapliyal et al. (2022) (0.8B) model got 57.6 of CIDEr on XM 3600 for English. Thapliyal et al. (2022) is Crossmodal-3600: A Massively Multilingual Multimodal Evaluation Dataset. However in this paper, the CIDEr values are reported less than 1. For example, the largest model got 0.584 of CIDEr on XM 3600 for English. Could someone explain to me why those values have great differences? submitted by /u/KingsmanVince [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey everyone. I am very passionate about getting in ML research and was wondering what the learning pathway was, particularly with regards to the theoretical Math and Statistics involved. For context: I am a second year undergraduate. By the end of this year, I will have taken and finished A Multivariable Calculus with Proofs course, so that is my current starting point. I have been working with ML for the last 3 years and am proficient in Python and frameworks like PyTorch. I have also made my own implementation of several research papers (LSTMs, GRUs, Transformers, ELMo, BERT, GPT, as well as a few computer vision papers). I have a good general intuition of how deep learning works, but I want to formalise this knowledge with the adequate mathematical background so that I can eventually pursue a career in research. I understand that I have plenty of time until I reach there, and I am willing to dedicate it to grinding out the math and statistical knowledge required. I have done my research on this sub and other forums, and here are a few resources that stood out: Mathematics for Machine Learning by Deisenroth, Faisal and Ong Advanced Calculus of Several Variables by C. H. Edwards Jr. Mathematical Methods Lecture Notes from Imperial College by Deisenroth and Cheraghchi The original information theory paper by Shannon The Elements of Statistical Learning by Hastie, Tibshirani and Friedman Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning by Bishop The Probabalistic Machine Learning Series by Kevin P. Murphy Deep Learning by Goodfellow, Bengio and Courville Mathematics of Machine Learning on MIT OCW (here) My question is, what order should I start self-learning in, given the (somewhat limited) background knowledge I have? Also, are there any other resources that would help? submitted by /u/Far_Clothes_5054 [link] [comments]  ( 10 min )

Hi everyone, With the different data points, such as phi-1.5 performance being as good as 7b models on some tasks, it seems to be plausible that small models can be quite capable on specific tasks. I am working on BlindChat, an open-source and private solution to run small LLMs on your browser and I am interested in fine-tuning a phi-1.5 on some domain specific data. I am thinking of having an approach similar to the researchers of the phi paper, which is creating a high quality dataset using GPT3.5 / GPT4. Do you know good open-source frameworks that make it easy to create a high quality data for a specific task using an existing large model, like GPT3.5/4 or Llama 2 70b? submitted by /u/Separate-Still3770 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I want to tune Facebook's LLaMA or any available LLM model to be able to answer questions about my business. The idea is to provide a prompt of the business and some Q&As, then based on the provided information, the AI chatbot will answer customers who ask questions about the business. If the answers to the questions are not known or the question is not relevant, the bot should say "I dont know". submitted by /u/the_aceix [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi, I have never done this before, but I have blocked user u/NuseAI from my feeds He/she is posting 'news' all over the AI subs, including this one, at the moment and is filling up my timeline ... and I simply don't feel right about what they are up to. Is it an AI bot? Is it a karma farmer? Is it some sort of spam? Am I being over cautious? If the consensus is that they are a normal poster - fine - I'll reenable their posts. In the meantime I'm enjoying a less cluttered feed! ​ submitted by /u/MrEloi [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Meta has launched chatbots with personalities similar to certain celebrities, which some experts believe could be dangerous. These chatbots have their own faces and social media accounts, and Meta is working on giving them a voice. However, experts argue that the idea of chatbots with personalities is impossible, as algorithms cannot demonstrate intention or free will. There is also a risk that chatbots with personalities could express problematic opinions, as seen in Meta's testing. Meta's project is driven by profit, as users are more likely to engage with chatbots that seem human. Experts believe that Meta should have explained the limits of these chatbots instead of emphasizing their human characteristics. Source : https://www.france24.com/en/technology/20230930-counterfeit-people-the-dangers-posed-by-meta-s-ai-celebrity-lookalike-chatbots submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/DukeWilder [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I was cooking chicken wings one evening ago in the not too distant past and this idea popped into my head. Before the night was over I went online and bought the domain name of GoGoAIGo . com and then the .ai version also. I put the dot com version up on Sedo (sedo.com/search/details/?domain=GoGoAIGo.com) for sale and I actually now own the .com .ai .org and .net versions of that phrase. Not only my decade but the two generational decades in front of me and the one generational decade behind me can remember our ole Inspector Gadget friend whom had a similar phrase, but not exact, that he would say. I'm an individual whom may hold onto something if I feel it has intrinsic value for a future development, which I think this can if laid out in an appropriate fashion. I'm working on another business project right now and I own some trademarks for my other business project so I'm not exactly a newbie in ways here I'm just kind of fresh to the AI realm studies. I think it's overblown right now but will be fine tuned over the next 5-7 years better and society will find a better seat for it. I could see this domain being like a search engine or something, maybe even something to do with robots. I expect AI robots moving forward will be regulated and have various classes that they are placed into as we integrate certain ones in our society. Let's be honest, the light-switch isn't flipping overnight or even in one quick year over this AI stuff. I'm in no rush to have a piece of AI wash my dishes for me to be honest. The last robotic thing I was thinking about getting was a robot mower to cut a field, I believe they are working on those now. Anybody have any unique ideas for me? I used to play with lego robots way back in high school in the early 2000's.... Seems like this website would make a great search engine but honestly there are other phrases that can be put into play with society also. Thanks for any mental stimulation you can toss in my direction. submitted by /u/Wise_Cut_2543 [link] [comments]  ( 10 min )

Imagine an app that's like a helpful buddy in your pocket, always looking out for the best moments to nudge you into some real-world socializing. For example, say you're a fan of watching sports. The app notices you frequently check scores or read articles on sports sites during weekends. Right before a big game, it pops up and says, "How about inviting some friends over to watch the game?" Now let's talk about making socializing a sort of game. Think of the way Fitbit rewards you for walking 10,000 steps. Similarly, this app could reward you with "social points" for various activities. Invite a friend for coffee? 10 points. Call your mom? 15 points. Organize a barbecue? 50 points. And so on. These points could unlock virtual badges or even real-world rewards like discounts at local restaurants to encourage you to keep going. When it comes to setting personal goals, let's say you've been wanting to improve your relationship with a sibling. You set a goal in the app to have at least one meaningful conversation with them each week. The app then reminds you on a lazy Sunday afternoon, suggesting, "Why not call your sister now? It’s a good time to catch up." And for reflection, after you've hung out with your friends to watch the game or had that talk with your sister, the app asks you to rate how good you felt on a scale of 1-10. Over time, you'll see a graph of your happiness levels correlated with your social activities, making it super clear that quality time with people is a mood booster. The whole idea is to keep it simple but effective, helping you to naturally weave more social interactions into your life without making you feel overwhelmed or stressed. submitted by /u/Georgeo57 [link] [comments]  ( 10 min )

AI has the potential to be a platform shift, similar to previous shifts like personal computers, the internet, and mobile. Platform shifts change the dominant layer that applications are built on and can capture the majority of value from the previous generation. AI could change distribution, business models, and what's possible in workflows. Changes in distribution could lead to new aggregators replacing old ones, making the aggregation of quality content more difficult. The business model may not change significantly, with AI likely being delivered as software-as-a-service. AI can enable new workflows and drastically change existing ones. While incumbents may accrue significant value, new platforms could also replace old ones. Source : https://matt-rickard.com/is-ai-a-platform-shift submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

It seems that large language models are getting bigger and bigger, and by growing they need more and more processing power. I know that some LLM developers have made smaller versions to test how small they can be made and function. But what happens when you want a LLM to do a specific job, surely it only needs a fraction of the data a general-purpose model does. Potential benefits of SLMs: Less data. Potentially faster. Less space to hallucinate/go wrong. Smaller set of potentials for complete testing. Running costs reduced. Lower spec hardware needs. Has anyone tried dedicating a LLM to a specific job/task and then optimizing its data size to create a SLM? TLDR; How large does a LLM have to be for a toaster or microwave? Talkie Toaster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLm6oTCFcxQ submitted by /u/Arowx [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/Jariiari7 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/Senior_tasteey [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Scoured the Internet using all available tools. All I've come up with is proprietary and obsolete software and/or GUI-based software. My goal is to create an ElevenLabs type api but for singing. Something like Flinger (dead) would be ideal. If I can't find it I plan to write it but I'd rather not reinvent the wheel. submitted by /u/geeezeredm [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I have access to texts of thousands of world news daily. Is it possible to make an AI that would analyze them and sort by importance? All I could find similar is NLP for analyzing text content and extracting keywords, or metadata, but this approach doesn't work well. I want for AI to grasp the essence of news and deeply understand their importance, to comprehend how an event affects many people's lives and has significant impact on society or the world as a whole. submitted by /u/canman44999 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I was able to throw these images together in seconds and it has me stunned. This is all in the first year of mainstream AI. Where are we going to be this time next year.. Philosophically what do you believe is going to happen to our paradigms of reality over the coming years? This is an especially challenging thought because we consume so much content and information digitally. I'm a little worried about how humans will or will not adjust to this incoming technology. I'm having my first child soon and it's interesting to think about what I may have to teach them. That nothing you consume digitally is real, only what you can experience with all 5 senses in your local environment is. Strange thoughts to be having for sure. With peace, Aqua. submitted by /u/Aquaritek [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

An interesting article about ethics and AI in the real world versus what we find in scifi. Exploring points like privacy invasion, possible sentience, control and moral decisions. https://discover.hubpages.com/technology/the-ethical-dilemmas-of-ai-in-sci-fi-and-reality submitted by /u/No_Adhesiveness_7209 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Meta Platforms (META.O) Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday rolled out new AI products for consumers, including bots that create photo-realistic images and smart glasses that answer questions, as well as an updated virtual-reality headset.[1] The European Union is examining alleged anticompetitive practices in chips used for artificial intelligence, a market that Nvidia (NVDA.O) dominates, Bloomberg News reported on Friday, citing people familiar with the matter.[2] Sex robots powered by futuristic AI algorithm will one day give humans the best sex of their lives, it has been sensationally claimed.[3] National Security Agency Director Army Gen. Paul M. Nakasone today announced the creation of a new entity to oversee the development and integration of artificial intelligence capabilities within U.S. national security systems.[4] Sources: [1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/meta-signal-future-arvr-investments-annual-connect-conference-2023-09-27/ [2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/eu-starts-early-stage-probe-into-nvidia-dominated-ai-chip-market-abuses-2023-09-29/ [3] https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/sex-robots-using-ai-give-31059169 [4] https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3541838/ai-security-center-to-open-at-national-security-agency/ submitted by /u/Excellent-Target-847 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Coupon collector problem Suppose you have a bag of balls labeled 1 through 1,000. You draw draw balls one at a time and put them back after each draw. How many draws would you have to make before you’ve seen every ball at least once? This is the coupon collector problem with N = 1000, […] Consecutive coupon collector problem first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 6 min )

Hi folks! Since you've saved my ass before, maybe you have an idea about my issue here, too. I'm training and testing a custom RNN, but I receive the following error message: File "/home/.conda/envs/ray/lib/python3.9/site-packages/ray/rllib/utils/threading.py", line 24, in wrapper return func(self, *a, **k) File "/home/.conda/envs/ray/lib/python3.9/site-packages/ray/rllib/policy/torch_policy_v2.py", line 1291, in _compute_action_helper dist_inputs, state_out = self.model(input_dict, state_batches, seq_lens) File "/home/.conda/envs/ray/lib/python3.9/site-packages/ray/rllib/models/modelv2.py", line 259, in __call__ res = self.forward(restored, state or [], seq_lens) File "/home/.conda/envs/ray/lib/python3.9/site-packages/ray/rllib/models/torch/recurrent_net.py", line 92, in forward i…  ( 9 min )

We introduce RACH-Space, a novel classification method in ensemble learning. In particular, we show its applicability as a label model for weakly supervised learning. RACH-Space offers simplicity in implementation with minimal assumptions on the data or weak signals. The model is well suited for scenarios where fully labeled data is not available. Our method is built upon geometrical interpretation of the space spanned by weak signals. Our analysis of the high dimensional convex hull structure underlying general set of weak signals bridges geometry with machine learning. Empirical results also demonstrate that RACH-Space works well in practice and compares favorably to best existing label models for weakly supervised learning.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we introduce a novel analysis of neural networks based on geometric (Clifford) algebra and convex optimization. We show that optimal weights of deep ReLU neural networks are given by the wedge product of training samples when trained with standard regularized loss. Furthermore, the training problem reduces to convex optimization over wedge product features, which encode the geometric structure of the training dataset. This structure is given in terms of signed volumes of triangles and parallelotopes generated by data vectors. The convex problem finds a small subset of samples via $\ell_1$ regularization to discover only relevant wedge product features. Our analysis provides a novel perspective on the inner workings of deep neural networks and sheds light on the role of the hidden layers.  ( 2 min )

Property prediction plays an important role in material discovery. As an initial step to eventually develop a foundation model for material science, we introduce a new autoencoder called the MHG-GNN, which combines graph neural network (GNN) with Molecular Hypergraph Grammar (MHG). Results on a variety of property prediction tasks with diverse materials show that MHG-GNN is promising.  ( 2 min )

It can largely benefit the reinforcement learning (RL) process of each agent if multiple geographically distributed agents perform their separate RL tasks cooperatively. Different from multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) where multiple agents are in a common environment and should learn to cooperate or compete with each other, in this case each agent has its separate environment and only communicates with others to share knowledge without any cooperative or competitive behaviour as a learning outcome. In fact, this scenario exists widely in real life whose concept can be utilised in many applications, but is not well understood yet and not well formulated. As the first effort, we propose group-agent system for RL as a formulation of this scenario and the third type of RL system with respect to single-agent and multi-agent systems. We then propose a distributed RL framework called DDAL (Decentralised Distributed Asynchronous Learning) designed for group-agent reinforcement learning (GARL). We show through experiments that DDAL achieved desirable performance with very stable training and has good scalability.  ( 2 min )

Classifiers built upon vision-language models such as CLIP have shown remarkable zero-shot performance across a broad range of image classification tasks. Prior work has studied different ways of automatically creating descriptor sets for every class based on prompt templates, ranging from manually engineered templates over templates obtained from a large language model to templates built from random words and characters. In contrast, deriving zero-shot classifiers from the respective encoded class descriptors has remained nearly unchanged, that is: classify to the class that maximizes the cosine similarity between its averaged encoded class descriptors and the encoded image. However, weighting all class descriptors equally can be suboptimal when certain descriptors match visual clues on a given image better than others. In this work, we propose AutoCLIP, a method for auto-tuning zero-shot classifiers. AutoCLIP assigns to each prompt template per-image weights, which are derived from statistics of class descriptor-image similarities at inference time. AutoCLIP is fully unsupervised, has very low overhead, and can be easily implemented in few lines of code. We show that for a broad range of vision-language models, datasets, and prompt templates, AutoCLIP outperforms baselines consistently and by up to 3 percent point accuracy.  ( 2 min )

Consistency regularization-based methods are prevalent in semi-supervised learning (SSL) algorithms due to their exceptional performance. However, they mainly depend on domain-specific data augmentations, which are not usable in domains where data augmentations are less practicable. On the other hand, Pseudo-labeling (PL) is a general and domain-agnostic SSL approach that, unlike consistency regularization-based methods, does not rely on the domain. PL underperforms due to the erroneous high-confidence predictions from poorly calibrated models. This paper proposes an uncertainty-aware pseudo-label selection framework that employs uncertainty sets yielded by the conformal regularization algorithm to fix the poor calibration neural networks, reducing noisy training data. The codes of this work are available at: https://github.com/matinmoezzi/ups conformal classification  ( 2 min )

Adversarial Machine Learning (AML) is a rapidly growing field of security research, with an often overlooked area being model attacks through side-channels. Previous works show such attacks to be serious threats, though little progress has been made on efficient remediation strategies that avoid costly model re-engineering. This work demonstrates a new defense against AML side-channel attacks using model compilation techniques, namely tensor optimization. We show relative model attack effectiveness decreases of up to 43% using tensor optimization, discuss the implications, and direction of future work.  ( 2 min )

Compositional generalization is a key ability of humans that enables us to learn new concepts from only a handful examples. Machine learning models, including the now ubiquitous transformers, struggle to generalize in this way, and typically require thousands of examples of a concept during training in order to generalize meaningfully. This difference in ability between humans and artificial neural architectures, motivates this study on a neuro-symbolic architecture called the Compositional Program Generator (CPG). CPG has three key features: modularity, type abstraction, and recursive composition, that enable it to generalize both systematically to new concepts in a few-shot manner, as well as productively by length on various sequence-to-sequence language tasks. For each input, CPG uses a grammar of the input domain and a parser to generate a type hierarchy in which each grammar rule is assigned its own unique semantic module, a probabilistic copy or substitution program. Instances with the same hierarchy are processed with the same composed program, while those with different hierarchies may be processed with different programs. CPG learns parameters for the semantic modules and is able to learn the semantics for new types incrementally. Given a context-free grammar of the input language and a dictionary mapping each word in the source language to its interpretation in the output language, CPG can achieve perfect generalization on the SCAN and COGS benchmarks, in both standard and extreme few-shot settings.  ( 3 min )

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is a promising approach for training deep classification models using labeled and unlabeled datasets. However, existing SSL methods rely on a large unlabeled dataset, which may not always be available in many real-world applications due to legal constraints (e.g., GDPR). In this paper, we investigate the research question: Can we train SSL models without real unlabeled datasets? Instead of using real unlabeled datasets, we propose an SSL method using synthetic datasets generated from generative foundation models trained on datasets containing millions of samples in diverse domains (e.g., ImageNet). Our main concepts are identifying synthetic samples that emulate unlabeled samples from generative foundation models and training classifiers using these synthetic samples. To achieve this, our method is formulated as an alternating optimization problem: (i) meta-learning of generative foundation models and (ii) SSL of classifiers using real labeled and synthetic unlabeled samples. For (i), we propose a meta-learning objective that optimizes latent variables to generate samples that resemble real labeled samples and minimize the validation loss. For (ii), we propose a simple unsupervised loss function that regularizes the feature extractors of classifiers to maximize the performance improvement obtained from synthetic samples. We confirm that our method outperforms baselines using generative foundation models on SSL. We also demonstrate that our methods outperform SSL using real unlabeled datasets in scenarios with extremely small amounts of labeled datasets. This suggests that synthetic samples have the potential to provide improvement gains more efficiently than real unlabeled data.  ( 3 min )

This work presents an instance-agnostic learning framework that fuses vision with dynamics to simultaneously learn shape, pose trajectories, and physical properties via the use of geometry as a shared representation. Unlike many contact learning approaches that assume motion capture input and a known shape prior for the collision model, our proposed framework learns an object's geometric and dynamic properties from RGBD video, without requiring either category-level or instance-level shape priors. We integrate a vision system, BundleSDF, with a dynamics system, ContactNets, and propose a cyclic training pipeline to use the output from the dynamics module to refine the poses and the geometry from the vision module, using perspective reprojection. Experiments demonstrate our framework's ability to learn the geometry and dynamics of rigid and convex objects and improve upon the current tracking framework.  ( 2 min )

Flexible robots may overcome some of the industry's major challenges, such as enabling intrinsically safe human-robot collaboration and achieving a higher load-to-mass ratio. However, controlling flexible robots is complicated due to their complex dynamics, which include oscillatory behavior and a high-dimensional state space. NMPC offers an effective means to control such robots, but its extensive computational demands often limit its application in real-time scenarios. To enable fast control of flexible robots, we propose a framework for a safe approximation of NMPC using imitation learning and a predictive safety filter. Our framework significantly reduces computation time while incurring a slight loss in performance. Compared to NMPC, our framework shows more than a eightfold improvement in computation time when controlling a three-dimensional flexible robot arm in simulation, all while guaranteeing safety constraints. Notably, our approach outperforms conventional reinforcement learning methods. The development of fast and safe approximate NMPC holds the potential to accelerate the adoption of flexible robots in industry.  ( 2 min )

Accurately predicting the prices of financial time series is essential and challenging for the financial sector. Owing to recent advancements in deep learning techniques, deep learning models are gradually replacing traditional statistical and machine learning models as the first choice for price forecasting tasks. This shift in model selection has led to a notable rise in research related to applying deep learning models to price forecasting, resulting in a rapid accumulation of new knowledge. Therefore, we conducted a literature review of relevant studies over the past three years with a view to aiding researchers and practitioners in the field. This review delves deeply into deep learning-based forecasting models, presenting information on model architectures, practical applications, and their respective advantages and disadvantages. In particular, detailed information is provided on advanced models for price forecasting, such as Transformers, generative adversarial networks (GANs), graph neural networks (GNNs), and deep quantum neural networks (DQNNs). The present contribution also includes potential directions for future research, such as examining the effectiveness of deep learning models with complex structures for price forecasting, extending from point prediction to interval prediction using deep learning models, scrutinising the reliability and validity of decomposition ensembles, and exploring the influence of data volume on model performance.  ( 3 min )

The field of Tiny Machine Learning (TinyML) has made substantial advancements in democratizing machine learning on low-footprint devices, such as microcontrollers. The prevalence of these miniature devices raises the question of whether aggregating their knowledge can benefit TinyML applications. Federated meta-learning is a promising answer to this question, as it addresses the scarcity of labeled data and heterogeneous data distribution across devices in the real world. However, deploying TinyML hardware faces unique resource constraints, making existing methods impractical due to energy, privacy, and communication limitations. We introduce TinyMetaFed, a model-agnostic meta-learning framework suitable for TinyML. TinyMetaFed facilitates collaborative training of a neural network initialization that can be quickly fine-tuned on new devices. It offers communication savings and privacy protection through partial local reconstruction and Top-P% selective communication, computational efficiency via online learning, and robustness to client heterogeneity through few-shot learning. The evaluations on three TinyML use cases demonstrate that TinyMetaFed can significantly reduce energy consumption and communication overhead, accelerate convergence, and stabilize the training process.  ( 2 min )

Pairwise comparison of graphs is key to many applications in Machine learning ranging from clustering, kernel-based classification/regression and more recently supervised graph prediction. Distances between graphs usually rely on informative representations of these structured objects such as bag of substructures or other graph embeddings. A recently popular solution consists in representing graphs as metric measure spaces, allowing to successfully leverage Optimal Transport, which provides meaningful distances allowing to compare them: the Gromov-Wasserstein distances. However, this family of distances overlooks edge attributes, which are essential for many structured objects. In this work, we introduce an extension of Gromov-Wasserstein distance for comparing graphs whose both nodes and edges have features. We propose novel algorithms for distance and barycenter computation. We empirically show the effectiveness of the novel distance in learning tasks where graphs occur in either input space or output space, such as classification and graph prediction.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we introduce two types of novel Asymptotic-Preserving Convolutional Deep Operator Networks (APCONs) designed to address the multiscale time-dependent linear transport problem. We observe that the vanilla physics-informed DeepONets with modified MLP may exhibit instability in maintaining the desired limiting macroscopic behavior. Therefore, this necessitates the utilization of an asymptotic-preserving loss function. Drawing inspiration from the heat kernel in the diffusion equation, we propose a new architecture called Convolutional Deep Operator Networks, which employ multiple local convolution operations instead of a global heat kernel, along with pooling and activation operations in each filter layer. Our APCON methods possess a parameter count that is independent of the grid size and are capable of capturing the diffusive behavior of the linear transport problem. Finally, we validate the effectiveness of our methods through several numerical examples.  ( 2 min )

Automated diagnosis of eczema from digital camera images is crucial for developing applications that allow patients to self-monitor their recovery. An important component of this is the segmentation of eczema region from such images. Current methods for eczema segmentation rely on deep neural networks such as convolutional (CNN)-based U-Net or transformer-based Swin U-Net. While effective, these methods require high volume of annotated data, which can be difficult to obtain. Here, we investigate the capabilities of visual in-context learning that can perform few-shot eczema segmentation with just a handful of examples and without any need for retraining models. Specifically, we propose a strategy for applying in-context learning for eczema segmentation with a generalist vision model called SegGPT. When benchmarked on a dataset of annotated eczema images, we show that SegGPT with just 2 representative example images from the training dataset performs better (mIoU: 36.69) than a CNN U-Net trained on 428 images (mIoU: 32.60). We also discover that using more number of examples for SegGPT may in fact be harmful to its performance. Our result highlights the importance of visual in-context learning in developing faster and better solutions to skin imaging tasks. Our result also paves the way for developing inclusive solutions that can cater to minorities in the demographics who are typically heavily under-represented in the training data.  ( 2 min )

The recent surge of interest surrounding Multimodal Neural Networks (MM-NN) is attributed to their ability to effectively process and integrate multiscale information from diverse data sources. MM-NNs extract and fuse features from multiple modalities using adequate unimodal backbones and specific fusion networks. Although this helps strengthen the multimodal information representation, designing such networks is labor-intensive. It requires tuning the architectural parameters of the unimodal backbones, choosing the fusing point, and selecting the operations for fusion. Furthermore, multimodality AI is emerging as a cutting-edge option in Internet of Things (IoT) systems where inference latency and energy consumption are critical metrics in addition to accuracy. In this paper, we propose Harmonic-NAS, a framework for the joint optimization of unimodal backbones and multimodal fusion networks with hardware awareness on resource-constrained devices. Harmonic-NAS involves a two-tier optimization approach for the unimodal backbone architectures and fusion strategy and operators. By incorporating the hardware dimension into the optimization, evaluation results on various devices and multimodal datasets have demonstrated the superiority of Harmonic-NAS over state-of-the-art approaches achieving up to 10.9% accuracy improvement, 1.91x latency reduction, and 2.14x energy efficiency gain.  ( 2 min )

This paper studies the problem of learning the large-scale Gaussian graphical models that are multivariate totally positive of order two ($\text{MTP}_2$). By introducing the concept of bridge, which commonly exists in large-scale sparse graphs, we show that the entire problem can be equivalently optimized through (1) several smaller-scaled sub-problems induced by a \emph{bridge-block decomposition} on the thresholded sample covariance graph and (2) a set of explicit solutions on entries corresponding to \emph{bridges}. From practical aspect, this simple and provable discipline can be applied to break down a large problem into small tractable ones, leading to enormous reduction on the computational complexity and substantial improvements for all existing algorithms. The synthetic and real-world experiments demonstrate that our proposed method presents a significant speed-up compared to the state-of-the-art benchmarks.  ( 2 min )

Regularization plays a crucial role in machine learning models, especially for deep neural networks. The existing regularization techniques mainly rely on the i.i.d. assumption and only consider the knowledge from the current sample, without the leverage of the neighboring relationship between samples. In this work, we propose a general regularizer called \textbf{Patch-level Neighborhood Interpolation~(Pani)} that conducts a non-local representation in the computation of networks. Our proposal explicitly constructs patch-level graphs in different layers and then linearly interpolates neighborhood patch features, serving as a general and effective regularization strategy. Further, we customize our approach into two kinds of popular regularization methods, namely Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT) and MixUp as well as its variants. The first derived \textbf{Pani VAT} presents a novel way to construct non-local adversarial smoothness by employing patch-level interpolated perturbations. The second derived \textbf{Pani MixUp} method extends the MixUp, and achieves superiority over MixUp and competitive performance over state-of-the-art variants of MixUp method with a significant advantage in computational efficiency. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of our Pani approach in both supervised and semi-supervised settings.  ( 2 min )

Federated learning has gained popularity as a means of training models distributed across the wireless edge. The paper introduces delay-aware hierarchical federated learning (DFL) to improve the efficiency of distributed machine learning (ML) model training by accounting for communication delays between edge and cloud. Different from traditional federated learning, DFL leverages multiple stochastic gradient descent iterations on local datasets within each global aggregation period and intermittently aggregates model parameters through edge servers in local subnetworks. During global synchronization, the cloud server consolidates local models with the outdated global model using a local-global combiner, thus preserving crucial elements of both, enhancing learning efficiency under the presence of delay. A set of conditions is obtained to achieve the sub-linear convergence rate of O(1/k) for strongly convex and smooth loss functions. Based on these findings, an adaptive control algorithm is developed for DFL, implementing policies to mitigate energy consumption and communication latency while aiming for sublinear convergence. Numerical evaluations show DFL's superior performance in terms of faster global model convergence, reduced resource consumption, and robustness against communication delays compared to existing FL algorithms. In summary, this proposed method offers improved efficiency and results when dealing with both convex and non-convex loss functions.  ( 2 min )

As machine learning models are increasingly being employed in various high-stakes settings, it becomes important to ensure that predictions of these models are not only adversarially robust, but also readily explainable to relevant stakeholders. However, it is unclear if these two notions can be simultaneously achieved or if there exist trade-offs between them. In this work, we make one of the first attempts at studying the impact of adversarially robust models on actionable explanations which provide end users with a means for recourse. We theoretically and empirically analyze the cost (ease of implementation) and validity (probability of obtaining a positive model prediction) of recourses output by state-of-the-art algorithms when the underlying models are adversarially robust vs. non-robust. More specifically, we derive theoretical bounds on the differences between the cost and the validity of the recourses generated by state-of-the-art algorithms for adversarially robust vs. non-robust linear and non-linear models. Our empirical results with multiple real-world datasets validate our theoretical results and show the impact of varying degrees of model robustness on the cost and validity of the resulting recourses. Our analyses demonstrate that adversarially robust models significantly increase the cost and reduce the validity of the resulting recourses, thus shedding light on the inherent trade-offs between adversarial robustness and actionable explanations  ( 2 min )

While reliable data-driven decision-making hinges on high-quality labeled data, the acquisition of quality labels often involves laborious human annotations or slow and expensive scientific measurements. Machine learning is becoming an appealing alternative as sophisticated predictive techniques are being used to quickly and cheaply produce large amounts of predicted labels; e.g., predicted protein structures are used to supplement experimentally derived structures, predictions of socioeconomic indicators from satellite imagery are used to supplement accurate survey data, and so on. Since predictions are imperfect and potentially biased, this practice brings into question the validity of downstream inferences. We introduce cross-prediction: a method for valid inference powered by machine learning. With a small labeled dataset and a large unlabeled dataset, cross-prediction imputes the missing labels via machine learning and applies a form of debiasing to remedy the prediction inaccuracies. The resulting inferences achieve the desired error probability and are more powerful than those that only leverage the labeled data. Closely related is the recent proposal of prediction-powered inference, which assumes that a good pre-trained model is already available. We show that cross-prediction is consistently more powerful than an adaptation of prediction-powered inference in which a fraction of the labeled data is split off and used to train the model. Finally, we observe that cross-prediction gives more stable conclusions than its competitors; its confidence intervals typically have significantly lower variability.  ( 2 min )

Federated learning is an important privacy-preserving multi-party learning paradigm, involving collaborative learning with others and local updating on private data. Model heterogeneity and catastrophic forgetting are two crucial challenges, which greatly limit the applicability and generalizability. This paper presents a novel FCCL+, federated correlation and similarity learning with non-target distillation, facilitating the both intra-domain discriminability and inter-domain generalization. For heterogeneity issue, we leverage irrelevant unlabeled public data for communication between the heterogeneous participants. We construct cross-correlation matrix and align instance similarity distribution on both logits and feature levels, which effectively overcomes the communication barrier and improves the generalizable ability. For catastrophic forgetting in local updating stage, FCCL+ introduces Federated Non Target Distillation, which retains inter-domain knowledge while avoiding the optimization conflict issue, fulling distilling privileged inter-domain information through depicting posterior classes relation. Considering that there is no standard benchmark for evaluating existing heterogeneous federated learning under the same setting, we present a comprehensive benchmark with extensive representative methods under four domain shift scenarios, supporting both heterogeneous and homogeneous federated settings. Empirical results demonstrate the superiority of our method and the efficiency of modules on various scenarios.  ( 2 min )

The success of language models, especially transformer-based architectures, has trickled into other domains giving rise to "scientific language models" that operate on small molecules, proteins or polymers. In chemistry, language models contribute to accelerating the molecule discovery cycle as evidenced by promising recent findings in early-stage drug discovery. Here, we review the role of language models in molecular discovery, underlining their strength in de novo drug design, property prediction and reaction chemistry. We highlight valuable open-source software assets thus lowering the entry barrier to the field of scientific language modeling. Last, we sketch a vision for future molecular design that combines a chatbot interface with access to computational chemistry tools. Our contribution serves as a valuable resource for researchers, chemists, and AI enthusiasts interested in understanding how language models can and will be used to accelerate chemical discovery.  ( 2 min )

We present a method for synthesizing dynamic, reduced-order output-feedback polynomial control policies for control-affine nonlinear systems which guarantees runtime stability to a goal state, when using visual observations and a learned perception module in the feedback control loop. We leverage Lyapunov analysis to formulate the problem of synthesizing such policies. This problem is nonconvex in the policy parameters and the Lyapunov function that is used to prove the stability of the policy. To solve this problem approximately, we propose two approaches: the first solves a sequence of sum-of-squares optimization problems to iteratively improve a policy which is provably-stable by construction, while the second directly performs gradient-based optimization on the parameters of the polynomial policy, and its closed-loop stability is verified a posteriori. We extend our approach to provide stability guarantees in the presence of observation noise, which realistically arises due to errors in the learned perception module. We evaluate our approach on several underactuated nonlinear systems, including pendula and quadrotors, showing that our guarantees translate to empirical stability when controlling these systems from images, while baseline approaches can fail to reliably stabilize the system.

Designing models that are both expressive and preserve known invariances of tasks is an increasingly hard problem. Existing solutions tradeoff invariance for computational or memory resources. In this work, we show how to leverage randomness and design models that are both expressive and invariant but use less resources. Inspired by randomized algorithms, our key insight is that accepting probabilistic notions of universal approximation and invariance can reduce our resource requirements. More specifically, we propose a class of binary classification models called Randomized Linear Classifiers (RLCs). We give parameter and sample size conditions in which RLCs can, with high probability, approximate any (smooth) function while preserving invariance to compact group transformations. Leveraging this result, we design three RLCs that are provably probabilistic invariant for classification tasks over sets, graphs, and spherical data. We show how these models can achieve probabilistic invariance and universality using less resources than (deterministic) neural networks and their invariant counterparts. Finally, we empirically demonstrate the benefits of this new class of models on invariant tasks where deterministic invariant neural networks are known to struggle.

Model overconfidence and poor calibration are common in machine learning and difficult to account for when applying standard empirical risk minimization. In this work, we propose a novel method to alleviate these problems that we call odd-$k$-out learning (OKO), which minimizes the cross-entropy error for sets rather than for single examples. This naturally allows the model to capture correlations across data examples and achieves both better accuracy and calibration, especially in limited training data and class-imbalanced regimes. Perhaps surprisingly, OKO often yields better calibration even when training with hard labels and dropping any additional calibration parameter tuning, such as temperature scaling. We provide theoretical justification, establishing that OKO naturally yields better calibration, and provide extensive experimental analyses that corroborate our theoretical findings. We emphasize that OKO is a general framework that can be easily adapted to many settings and the trained model can be applied to single examples at inference time, without introducing significant run-time overhead or architecture changes.

The correlation between the sharpness of loss minima and generalisation in the context of deep neural networks has been subject to discussion for a long time. Whilst mostly investigated in the context of selected benchmark data sets in the area of computer vision, we explore this aspect for the audio scene classification task of the DCASE2020 challenge data. Our analysis is based on twodimensional filter-normalised visualisations and a derived sharpness measure. Our exploratory analysis shows that sharper minima tend to show better generalisation than flat minima -even more so for out-of-domain data, recorded from previously unseen devices-, thus adding to the dispute about better generalisation capabilities of flat minima. We further find that, in particular, the choice of optimisers is a main driver of the sharpness of minima and we discuss resulting limitations with respect to comparability. Our code, trained model states and loss landscape visualisations are publicly available.

Contrastive deep graph clustering (CDGC) utilizes contrastive learning to group nodes into different clusters. Better augmentation techniques benefit the quality of the contrastive samples, thus being one of key factors to improve performance. However, the augmentation samples in existing methods are always predefined by human experiences, and agnostic from the downstream task clustering, thus leading to high human resource costs and poor performance. To this end, we propose an Attribute Graph Clustering method via Learnable Augmentation (\textbf{AGCLA}), which introduces learnable augmentors for high-quality and suitable augmented samples for CDGC. Specifically, we design two learnable augmentors for attribute and structure information, respectively. Besides, two refinement matrices, including the high-confidence pseudo-label matrix and the cross-view sample similarity matrix, are generated to improve the reliability of the learned affinity matrix. During the training procedure, we notice that there exist differences between the optimization goals for training learnable augmentors and contrastive learning networks. In other words, we should both guarantee the consistency of the embeddings as well as the diversity of the augmented samples. Thus, an adversarial learning mechanism is designed in our method. Moreover, a two-stage training strategy is leveraged for the high-confidence refinement matrices. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of AGCLA on six benchmark datasets.

Previous work on learning physical systems from data has focused on high-resolution grid-structured measurements. However, real-world knowledge of such systems (e.g. weather data) relies on sparsely scattered measuring stations. In this paper, we introduce a novel simulated benchmark dataset, DynaBench, for learning dynamical systems directly from sparsely scattered data without prior knowledge of the equations. The dataset focuses on predicting the evolution of a dynamical system from low-resolution, unstructured measurements. We simulate six different partial differential equations covering a variety of physical systems commonly used in the literature and evaluate several machine learning models, including traditional graph neural networks and point cloud processing models, with the task of predicting the evolution of the system. The proposed benchmark dataset is expected to advance the state of art as an out-of-the-box easy-to-use tool for evaluating models in a setting where only unstructured low-resolution observations are available. The benchmark is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/code-2022-dynabench/.

Vertical Federated Learning (VFL) is a federated learning setting where multiple parties with different features about the same set of users jointly train machine learning models without exposing their raw data or model parameters. Motivated by the rapid growth in VFL research and real-world applications, we provide a comprehensive review of the concept and algorithms of VFL, as well as current advances and challenges in various aspects, including effectiveness, efficiency, and privacy. We provide an exhaustive categorization for VFL settings and privacy-preserving protocols and comprehensively analyze the privacy attacks and defense strategies for each protocol. In the end, we propose a unified framework, termed VFLow, which considers the VFL problem under communication, computation, privacy, as well as effectiveness and fairness constraints. Finally, we review the most recent advances in industrial applications, highlighting open challenges and future directions for VFL.

The quality of pre-training data plays a critical role in the performance of foundation models. Popular foundation models often design their own recipe for data filtering, which makes it hard to analyze and compare different data filtering approaches. DataComp is a new benchmark dedicated to evaluating different methods for data filtering. This paper describes our learning and solution when participating in the DataComp challenge. Our filtering strategy includes three stages: single-modality filtering, cross-modality filtering, and data distribution alignment. We integrate existing methods and propose new solutions, such as computing CLIP score on horizontally flipped images to mitigate the interference of scene text, using vision and language models to retrieve training samples for target downstream tasks, rebalancing the data distribution to improve the efficiency of allocating the computational budget, etc. We slice and dice our design choices, provide in-depth analysis, and discuss open questions. Our approach outperforms the best method from the DataComp paper by over 4% on the average performance of 38 tasks and by over 2% on ImageNet.

This study explored the potential of gait analysis as a tool for assessing post-injury complications, e.g., infection, malunion, or hardware irritation, in patients with lower extremity fractures. The research focused on the proficiency of supervised machine learning models predicting complications using consecutive gait datasets. We identified patients with lower extremity fractures at an academic center. Patients underwent gait analysis with a chest-mounted IMU device. Using software, raw gait data was preprocessed, emphasizing 12 essential gait variables. Machine learning models including XGBoost, Logistic Regression, SVM, LightGBM, and Random Forest were trained, tested, and evaluated. Attention was given to class imbalance, addressed using SMOTE. We introduced a methodology to compute the Rate of Change (ROC) for gait variables, independent of the time difference between gait analyses. XGBoost was the optimal model both before and after applying SMOTE. Prior to SMOTE, the model achieved an average test AUC of 0.90 (95% CI: [0.79, 1.00]) and test accuracy of 86% (95% CI: [75%, 97%]). Feature importance analysis attributed importance to the duration between injury and gait analysis. Data patterns showed early physiological compensations, followed by stabilization phases, emphasizing prompt gait analysis. This study underscores the potential of machine learning, particularly XGBoost, in gait analysis for orthopedic care. Predicting post-injury complications, early gait assessment becomes vital, revealing intervention points. The findings support a shift in orthopedics towards a data-informed approach, enhancing patient outcomes.

Integrating and processing information from various sources or modalities are critical for obtaining a comprehensive and accurate perception of the real world. Drawing inspiration from neuroscience, we develop the Information-Theoretic Hierarchical Perception (ITHP) model, which utilizes the concept of information bottleneck. Distinct from most traditional fusion models that aim to incorporate all modalities as input, our model designates the prime modality as input, while the remaining modalities act as detectors in the information pathway. Our proposed perception model focuses on constructing an effective and compact information flow by achieving a balance between the minimization of mutual information between the latent state and the input modal state, and the maximization of mutual information between the latent states and the remaining modal states. This approach leads to compact latent state representations that retain relevant information while minimizing redundancy, thereby substantially enhancing the performance of downstream tasks. Experimental evaluations on both the MUStARD and CMU-MOSI datasets demonstrate that our model consistently distills crucial information in multimodal learning scenarios, outperforming state-of-the-art benchmarks.

Graph unlearning has emerged as a pivotal method to delete information from a pre-trained graph neural network (GNN). One may delete nodes, a class of nodes, edges, or a class of edges. An unlearning method enables the GNN model to comply with data protection regulations (i.e., the right to be forgotten), adapt to evolving data distributions, and reduce the GPU-hours carbon footprint by avoiding repetitive retraining. Existing partitioning and aggregation-based methods have limitations due to their poor handling of local graph dependencies and additional overhead costs. More recently, GNNDelete offered a model-agnostic approach that alleviates some of these issues. Our work takes a novel approach to address these challenges in graph unlearning through knowledge distillation, as it distills to delete in GNN (D2DGN). It is a model-agnostic distillation framework where the complete graph knowledge is divided and marked for retention and deletion. It performs distillation with response-based soft targets and feature-based node embedding while minimizing KL divergence. The unlearned model effectively removes the influence of deleted graph elements while preserving knowledge about the retained graph elements. D2DGN surpasses the performance of existing methods when evaluated on various real-world graph datasets by up to $43.1\%$ (AUC) in edge and node unlearning tasks. Other notable advantages include better efficiency, better performance in removing target elements, preservation of performance for the retained elements, and zero overhead costs. Notably, our D2DGN surpasses the state-of-the-art GNNDelete in AUC by $2.4\%$, improves membership inference ratio by $+1.3$, requires $10.2\times10^6$ fewer FLOPs per forward pass and up to $\mathbf{3.2}\times$ faster.

This paper studies Large Language Models (LLMs) for structured data--particularly graphs--a crucial data modality that remains underexplored in the LLM literature. We aim to understand when and why the incorporation of structural information inherent in graph data can improve the prediction performance of LLMs on node classification tasks. To address the ``when'' question, we examine a variety of prompting methods for encoding structural information, in settings where textual node features are either rich or scarce. For the ``why'' questions, we probe into two potential contributing factors to the LLM performance: data leakage and homophily. Our exploration of these questions reveals that (i) LLMs can benefit from structural information, especially when textual node features are scarce; (ii) there is no substantial evidence indicating that the performance of LLMs is significantly attributed to data leakage; and (iii) the performance of LLMs on a target node is strongly positively related to the local homophily ratio of the node.

Reliable forecasting of the future behavior of road agents is a critical component to safe planning in autonomous vehicles. Here, we represent continuous trajectories as sequences of discrete motion tokens and cast multi-agent motion prediction as a language modeling task over this domain. Our model, MotionLM, provides several advantages: First, it does not require anchors or explicit latent variable optimization to learn multimodal distributions. Instead, we leverage a single standard language modeling objective, maximizing the average log probability over sequence tokens. Second, our approach bypasses post-hoc interaction heuristics where individual agent trajectory generation is conducted prior to interactive scoring. Instead, MotionLM produces joint distributions over interactive agent futures in a single autoregressive decoding process. In addition, the model's sequential factorization enables temporally causal conditional rollouts. The proposed approach establishes new state-of-the-art performance for multi-agent motion prediction on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset, ranking 1st on the interactive challenge leaderboard.

The primary bottleneck towards obtaining good recognition performance in IR images is the lack of sufficient labeled training data, owing to the cost of acquiring such data. Realizing that object detection methods for the RGB modality are quite robust (at least for some commonplace classes, like person, car, etc.), thanks to the giant training sets that exist, in this work we seek to leverage cues from the RGB modality to scale object detectors to the IR modality, while preserving model performance in the RGB modality. At the core of our method, is a novel tensor decomposition method called TensorFact which splits the convolution kernels of a layer of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) into low-rank factor matrices, with fewer parameters than the original CNN. We first pretrain these factor matrices on the RGB modality, for which plenty of training data are assumed to exist and then augment only a few trainable parameters for training on the IR modality to avoid over-fitting, while encouraging them to capture complementary cues from those trained only on the RGB modality. We validate our approach empirically by first assessing how well our TensorFact decomposed network performs at the task of detecting objects in RGB images vis-a-vis the original network and then look at how well it adapts to IR images of the FLIR ADAS v1 dataset. For the latter, we train models under scenarios that pose challenges stemming from data paucity. From the experiments, we observe that: (i) TensorFact shows performance gains on RGB images; (ii) further, this pre-trained model, when fine-tuned, outperforms a standard state-of-the-art object detector on the FLIR ADAS v1 dataset by about 4% in terms of mAP 50 score.

Fair machine learning seeks to mitigate model prediction bias against certain demographic subgroups such as elder and female. Recently, fair representation learning (FRL) trained by deep neural networks has demonstrated superior performance, whereby representations containing no demographic information are inferred from the data and then used as the input to classification or other downstream tasks. Despite the development of FRL methods, their vulnerability under data poisoning attack, a popular protocol to benchmark model robustness under adversarial scenarios, is under-explored. Data poisoning attacks have been developed for classical fair machine learning methods which incorporate fairness constraints into shallow-model classifiers. Nonetheless, these attacks fall short in FRL due to notably different fairness goals and model architectures. This work proposes the first data poisoning framework attacking FRL. We induce the model to output unfair representations that contain as much demographic information as possible by injecting carefully crafted poisoning samples into the training data. This attack entails a prohibitive bilevel optimization, wherefore an effective approximated solution is proposed. A theoretical analysis on the needed number of poisoning samples is derived and sheds light on defending against the attack. Experiments on benchmark fairness datasets and state-of-the-art fair representation learning models demonstrate the superiority of our attack.

We consider the problem of private distributed multi-party multiplication. It is well-established that Shamir secret-sharing coding strategies can enable perfect information-theoretic privacy in distributed computation via the celebrated algorithm of Ben Or, Goldwasser and Wigderson (the "BGW algorithm"). However, perfect privacy and accuracy require an honest majority, that is, $N \geq 2t+1$ compute nodes are required to ensure privacy against any $t$ colluding adversarial nodes. By allowing for some controlled amount of information leakage and approximate multiplication instead of exact multiplication, we study coding schemes for the setting where the number of honest nodes can be a minority, that is $N< 2t+1.$ We develop a tight characterization privacy-accuracy trade-off for cases where $N < 2t+1$ by measuring information leakage using {differential} privacy instead of perfect privacy, and using the mean squared error metric for accuracy. A novel technical aspect is an intricately layered noise distribution that merges ideas from differential privacy and Shamir secret-sharing at different layers.  ( 2 min )

The purpose of this work is to transport the information from multiple randomized controlled trials to the target population where we only have the control group data. Previous works rely critically on the mean exchangeability assumption. However, as pointed out by many current studies, the mean exchangeability assumption might be violated. Motivated by the synthetic control method, we construct a synthetic treatment group for the target population by a weighted mixture of treatment groups of source populations. We estimate the weights by minimizing the conditional maximum mean discrepancy between the weighted control groups of source populations and the target population. We establish the asymptotic normality of the synthetic treatment group estimator based on the sieve semiparametric theory. Our method can serve as a novel complementary approach when the mean exchangeability assumption is violated. Experiments are conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.  ( 2 min )

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong capabilities in various aspects. However, when applying them to the highly specialized, safe-critical legal domain, it is unclear how much legal knowledge they possess and whether they can reliably perform legal-related tasks. To address this gap, we propose a comprehensive evaluation benchmark LawBench. LawBench has been meticulously crafted to have precise assessment of the LLMs' legal capabilities from three cognitive levels: (1) Legal knowledge memorization: whether LLMs can memorize needed legal concepts, articles and facts; (2) Legal knowledge understanding: whether LLMs can comprehend entities, events and relationships within legal text; (3) Legal knowledge applying: whether LLMs can properly utilize their legal knowledge and make necessary reasoning steps to solve realistic legal tasks. LawBench contains 20 diverse tasks covering 5 task types: single-label classification (SLC), multi-label classification (MLC), regression, extraction and generation. We perform extensive evaluations of 51 LLMs on LawBench, including 20 multilingual LLMs, 22 Chinese-oriented LLMs and 9 legal specific LLMs. The results show that GPT-4 remains the best-performing LLM in the legal domain, surpassing the others by a significant margin. While fine-tuning LLMs on legal specific text brings certain improvements, we are still a long way from obtaining usable and reliable LLMs in legal tasks. All data, model predictions and evaluation code are released in https://github.com/open-compass/LawBench/. We hope this benchmark provides in-depth understanding of the LLMs' domain-specified capabilities and speed up the development of LLMs in the legal domain.  ( 3 min )

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) defines the task of learning from a fixed batch of data lacking exhaustive exploration. Worst-case optimality algorithms, which calibrate a value-function model class from logged experience and perform some type of pessimistic evaluation under the learned model, have emerged as a promising paradigm for batch RL. However, contemporary works on this stream have commonly overlooked the hierarchical decision-making structure hidden in the optimization landscape. In this paper, we adopt a game-theoretical viewpoint and model the policy learning diagram as a two-player general-sum game with a leader-follower structure. We propose a novel stochastic gradient-based learning algorithm: StackelbergLearner, in which the leader player updates according to the total derivative of its objective instead of the usual individual gradient, and the follower player makes individual updates and ensures transition-consistent pessimistic reasoning. The derived learning dynamic naturally lends StackelbergLearner to a game-theoretic interpretation and provides a convergence guarantee to differentiable Stackelberg equilibria. From a theoretical standpoint, we provide instance-dependent regret bounds with general function approximation, which shows that our algorithm can learn a best-effort policy that is able to compete against any comparator policy that is covered by batch data. Notably, our theoretical regret guarantees only require realizability without any data coverage and strong function approximation conditions, e.g., Bellman closedness, which is in contrast to prior works lacking such guarantees. Through comprehensive experiments, we find that our algorithm consistently performs as well or better as compared to state-of-the-art methods in batch RL benchmark and real-world datasets.  ( 2 min )

We study unconstrained Online Linear Optimization with Lipschitz losses. The goal is to simultaneously achieve ($i$) second order gradient adaptivity; and ($ii$) comparator norm adaptivity also known as "parameter freeness" in the literature. Existing regret bounds (Cutkosky and Orabona, 2018; Mhammedi and Koolen, 2020; Jacobsen and Cutkosky, 2022) have the suboptimal $O(\sqrt{V_T\log V_T})$ dependence on the gradient variance $V_T$, while the present work improves it to the optimal rate $O(\sqrt{V_T})$ using a novel continuous-time-inspired algorithm, without any impractical doubling trick. This result can be extended to the setting with unknown Lipschitz constant, eliminating the range ratio problem from prior works (Mhammedi and Koolen, 2020). Concretely, we first show that the aimed simultaneous adaptivity can be achieved fairly easily in a continuous time analogue of the problem, where the environment is modeled by an arbitrary continuous semimartingale. Then, our key innovation is a new discretization argument that preserves such adaptivity in the discrete time adversarial setting. This refines a non-gradient-adaptive discretization argument from (Harvey et al., 2023), both algorithmically and analytically, which could be of independent interest.  ( 2 min )

Inferring biological relationships from cellular phenotypes in high-content microscopy screens provides significant opportunity and challenge in biological research. Prior results have shown that deep vision models can capture biological signal better than hand-crafted features. This work explores how weakly supervised and self-supervised deep learning approaches scale when training larger models on larger datasets. Our results show that both CNN- and ViT-based masked autoencoders significantly outperform weakly supervised models. At the high-end of our scale, a ViT-L/8 trained on over 3.5-billion unique crops sampled from 95-million microscopy images achieves relative improvements as high as 28% over our best weakly supervised models at inferring known biological relationships curated from public databases.  ( 2 min )

The advancement of fifth generation (5G) wireless communication networks has created a greater demand for wireless resource management solutions that offer high data rates, extensive coverage, minimal latency and energy-efficient performance. Nonetheless, traditional approaches have shortcomings when it comes to computational complexity and their ability to adapt to dynamic conditions, creating a gap between theoretical analysis and the practical execution of algorithmic solutions for managing wireless resources. Deep learning-based techniques offer promising solutions for bridging this gap with their substantial representation capabilities. We propose a novel unsupervised deep learning framework, which is called NNBF, for the design of uplink receive multi-user single input multiple output (MU-SIMO) beamforming. The primary objective is to enhance the throughput by focusing on maximizing the sum-rate while also offering computationally efficient solution, in contrast to established conventional methods. We conduct experiments for several antenna configurations. Our experimental results demonstrate that NNBF exhibits superior performance compared to our baseline methods, namely, zero-forcing beamforming (ZFBF) and minimum mean square error (MMSE) equalizer. Additionally, NNBF is scalable to the number of single-antenna user equipments (UEs) while baseline methods have significant computational burden due to matrix pseudo-inverse operation.

Light curves of stars encapsulate a wealth of information about stellar oscillations and granulation, thereby offering key insights into the internal structure and evolutionary state of stars. Conventional asteroseismic techniques have been largely confined to power spectral analysis, neglecting the valuable phase information contained within light curves. While recent machine learning applications in asteroseismology utilizing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have successfully inferred stellar attributes from light curves, they are often limited by the local feature extraction inherent in convolutional operations. To circumvent these constraints, we present $\textit{Astroconformer}$, a Transformer-based deep learning framework designed to capture long-range dependencies in stellar light curves. Our empirical analysis, which focuses on estimating surface gravity ($\log g$), is grounded in a carefully curated dataset derived from $\textit{Kepler}$ light curves. These light curves feature asteroseismic $\log g$ values spanning from 0.2 to 4.4. Our results underscore that, in the regime where the training data is abundant, $\textit{Astroconformer}$ attains a root-mean-square-error (RMSE) of 0.017 dex around $\log g \approx 3 $. Even in regions where training data are sparse, the RMSE can reach 0.1 dex. It outperforms not only the K-nearest neighbor-based model ($\textit{The SWAN}$) but also state-of-the-art CNNs. Ablation studies confirm that the efficacy of the models in this particular task is strongly influenced by the size of their receptive fields, with larger receptive fields correlating with enhanced performance. Moreover, we find that the attention mechanisms within $\textit{Astroconformer}$ are well-aligned with the inherent characteristics of stellar oscillations and granulation present in the light curves.

Mechanistic interpretability seeks to understand the internal mechanisms of machine learning models, where localization -- identifying the important model components -- is a key step. Activation patching, also known as causal tracing or interchange intervention, is a standard technique for this task (Vig et al., 2020), but the literature contains many variants with little consensus on the choice of hyperparameters or methodology. In this work, we systematically examine the impact of methodological details in activation patching, including evaluation metrics and corruption methods. In several settings of localization and circuit discovery in language models, we find that varying these hyperparameters could lead to disparate interpretability results. Backed by empirical observations, we give conceptual arguments for why certain metrics or methods may be preferred. Finally, we provide recommendations for the best practices of activation patching going forwards.

Worldwide Geo-localization aims to pinpoint the precise location of images taken anywhere on Earth. This task has considerable challenges due to immense variation in geographic landscapes. The image-to-image retrieval-based approaches fail to solve this problem on a global scale as it is not feasible to construct a large gallery of images covering the entire world. Instead, existing approaches divide the globe into discrete geographic cells, transforming the problem into a classification task. However, their performance is limited by the predefined classes and often results in inaccurate localizations when an image's location significantly deviates from its class center. To overcome these limitations, we propose GeoCLIP, a novel CLIP-inspired Image-to-GPS retrieval approach that enforces alignment between the image and its corresponding GPS locations. GeoCLIP's location encoder models the Earth as a continuous function by employing positional encoding through random Fourier features and constructing a hierarchical representation that captures information at varying resolutions to yield a semantically rich high-dimensional feature suitable to use even beyond geo-localization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work employing GPS encoding for geo-localization. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method via extensive experiments and ablations on benchmark datasets. We achieve competitive performance with just 20% of training data, highlighting its effectiveness even in limited-data settings. Furthermore, we qualitatively demonstrate geo-localization using a text query by leveraging CLIP backbone of our image encoder.

Auxiliary data sources have become increasingly important in epidemiological surveillance, as they are often available at a finer spatial and temporal resolution, larger coverage, and lower latency than traditional surveillance signals. We describe the problem of spatial and temporal heterogeneity in these signals derived from these data sources, where spatial and/or temporal biases are present. We present a method to use a ``guiding'' signal to correct for these biases and produce a more reliable signal that can be used for modeling and forecasting. The method assumes that the heterogeneity can be approximated by a low-rank matrix and that the temporal heterogeneity is smooth over time. We also present a hyperparameter selection algorithm to choose the parameters representing the matrix rank and degree of temporal smoothness of the corrections. In the absence of ground truth, we use maps and plots to argue that this method does indeed reduce heterogeneity. Reducing heterogeneity from auxiliary data sources greatly increases their utility in modeling and forecasting epidemics.

We investigate the high-dimensional properties of robust regression estimators in the presence of heavy-tailed contamination of both the covariates and response functions. In particular, we provide a sharp asymptotic characterisation of M-estimators trained on a family of elliptical covariate and noise data distributions including cases where second and higher moments do not exist. We show that, despite being consistent, the Huber loss with optimally tuned location parameter $\delta$ is suboptimal in the high-dimensional regime in the presence of heavy-tailed noise, highlighting the necessity of further regularisation to achieve optimal performance. This result also uncovers the existence of a curious transition in $\delta$ as a function of the sample complexity and contamination. Moreover, we derive the decay rates for the excess risk of ridge regression. We show that, while it is both optimal and universal for noise distributions with finite second moment, its decay rate can be considerably faster when the covariates' second moment does not exist. Finally, we show that our formulas readily generalise to a richer family of models and data distributions, such as generalised linear estimation with arbitrary convex regularisation trained on mixture models.

Rapidly developing machine learning methods has stimulated research interest in computationally reconstructing differential equations (DEs) from observational data which may provide additional insight into underlying causative mechanisms. In this paper, we propose a novel neural-ODE based method that uses spectral expansions in space to learn spatiotemporal DEs. The major advantage of our spectral neural DE learning approach is that it does not rely on spatial discretization, thus allowing the target spatiotemporal equations to contain long range, nonlocal spatial interactions that act on unbounded spatial domains. Our spectral approach is shown to be as accurate as some of the latest machine learning approaches for learning PDEs operating on bounded domains. By developing a spectral framework for learning both PDEs and integro-differential equations, we extend machine learning methods to apply to unbounded DEs and a larger class of problems.

Unrestricted adversarial attacks present a serious threat to deep learning models and adversarial defense techniques. They pose severe security problems for deep learning applications because they can effectively bypass defense mechanisms. However, previous attack methods often utilize Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), which are not theoretically provable and thus generate unrealistic examples by incorporating adversarial objectives, especially for large-scale datasets like ImageNet. In this paper, we propose a new method, called AdvDiff, to generate unrestricted adversarial examples with diffusion models. We design two novel adversarial guidance techniques to conduct adversarial sampling in the reverse generation process of diffusion models. These two techniques are effective and stable to generate high-quality, realistic adversarial examples by integrating gradients of the target classifier interpretably. Experimental results on MNIST and ImageNet datasets demonstrate that AdvDiff is effective to generate unrestricted adversarial examples, which outperforms GAN-based methods in terms of attack performance and generation quality.

The susceptibility of modern machine learning classifiers to adversarial examples has motivated theoretical results suggesting that these might be unavoidable. However, these results can be too general to be applicable to natural data distributions. Indeed, humans are quite robust for tasks involving vision. This apparent conflict motivates a deeper dive into the question: Are adversarial examples truly unavoidable? In this work, we theoretically demonstrate that a key property of the data distribution -- concentration on small-volume subsets of the input space -- determines whether a robust classifier exists. We further demonstrate that, for a data distribution concentrated on a union of low-dimensional linear subspaces, exploiting data structure naturally leads to classifiers that enjoy good robustness guarantees, improving upon methods for provable certification in certain regimes.

Enabling bipedal walking robots to learn how to maneuver over highly uneven, dynamically changing terrains is challenging due to the complexity of robot dynamics and interacted environments. Recent advancements in learning from demonstrations have shown promising results for robot learning in complex environments. While imitation learning of expert policies has been well-explored, the study of learning expert reward functions is largely under-explored in legged locomotion. This paper brings state-of-the-art Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) techniques to solving bipedal locomotion problems over complex terrains. We propose algorithms for learning expert reward functions, and we subsequently analyze the learned functions. Through nonlinear function approximation, we uncover meaningful insights into the expert's locomotion strategies. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate that training a bipedal locomotion policy with the inferred reward functions enhances its walking performance on unseen terrains, highlighting the adaptability offered by reward learning.

The Radio Neutrino Observatory in Greenland (RNO-G) is a radio-based ultra-high energy neutrino detector located at Summit Station, Greenland. It is still being constructed, with 7 stations currently operational. Neutrino detection works by measuring Askaryan radiation produced by neutrino-nucleon interactions. A neutrino candidate must be found amidst other backgrounds which are recorded at much higher rates -- including cosmic-rays and anthropogenic noise -- the origins of which are sometimes unknown. Here we describe a method to classify different noise classes using the latent space of a variational autoencoder. The latent space forms a compact representation that makes classification tractable. We analyze data from a noisy and a silent station. The method automatically detects and allows us to qualitatively separate multiple event classes, including physical wind-induced signals, for both the noisy and the quiet station.

Survival analysis plays a crucial role in many healthcare decisions, where the risk prediction for the events of interest can support an informative outlook for a patient's medical journey. Given the existence of data censoring, an effective way of survival analysis is to enforce the pairwise temporal concordance between censored and observed data, aiming to utilize the time interval before censoring as partially observed time-to-event labels for supervised learning. Although existing studies mostly employed ranking methods to pursue an ordering objective, contrastive methods which learn a discriminative embedding by having data contrast against each other, have not been explored thoroughly for survival analysis. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a novel Ontology-aware Temporality-based Contrastive Survival (OTCSurv) analysis framework that utilizes survival durations from both censored and observed data to define temporal distinctiveness and construct negative sample pairs with adjustable hardness for contrastive learning. Specifically, we first use an ontological encoder and a sequential self-attention encoder to represent the longitudinal EHR data with rich contexts. Second, we design a temporal contrastive loss to capture varying survival durations in a supervised setting through a hardness-aware negative sampling mechanism. Last, we incorporate the contrastive task into the time-to-event predictive task with multiple loss components. We conduct extensive experiments using a large EHR dataset to forecast the risk of hospitalized patients who are in danger of developing acute kidney injury (AKI), a critical and urgent medical condition. The effectiveness and explainability of the proposed model are validated through comprehensive quantitative and qualitative studies.

We consider the task of generating diverse and realistic videos guided by natural audio samples from a wide variety of semantic classes. For this task, the videos are required to be aligned both globally and temporally with the input audio: globally, the input audio is semantically associated with the entire output video, and temporally, each segment of the input audio is associated with a corresponding segment of that video. We utilize an existing text-conditioned video generation model and a pre-trained audio encoder model. The proposed method is based on a lightweight adaptor network, which learns to map the audio-based representation to the input representation expected by the text-to-video generation model. As such, it also enables video generation conditioned on text, audio, and, for the first time as far as we can ascertain, on both text and audio. We validate our method extensively on three datasets demonstrating significant semantic diversity of audio-video samples and further propose a novel evaluation metric (AV-Align) to assess the alignment of generated videos with input audio samples. AV-Align is based on the detection and comparison of energy peaks in both modalities. In comparison to recent state-of-the-art approaches, our method generates videos that are better aligned with the input sound, both with respect to content and temporal axis. We also show that videos produced by our method present higher visual quality and are more diverse.

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPAs) have recently emerged as a novel and powerful technique for self-supervised representation learning. They aim to learn an energy-based model by predicting the latent representation of a target signal $y$ from a context signal $x$. JEPAs bypass the need for data augmentation and negative samples, which are typically required by contrastive learning, while avoiding the overfitting issues associated with generative-based pretraining. In this paper, we show that graph-level representations can be effectively modeled using this paradigm and propose Graph-JEPA, the first JEPA for the graph domain. In particular, we employ masked modeling to learn embeddings for different subgraphs of the input graph. To endow the representations with the implicit hierarchy that is often present in graph-level concepts, we devise an alternative training objective that consists of predicting the coordinates of the encoded subgraphs on the unit hyperbola in the 2D plane. Extensive validation shows that Graph-JEPA can learn representations that are expressive and competitive in both graph classification and regression problems.

Developing the next generation of household robot helpers requires combining locomotion and interaction capabilities, which is generally referred to as mobile manipulation (MoMa). MoMa tasks are difficult due to the large action space of the robot and the common multi-objective nature of the task, e.g., efficiently reaching a goal while avoiding obstacles. Current approaches often segregate tasks into navigation without manipulation and stationary manipulation without locomotion by manually matching parts of the action space to MoMa sub-objectives (e.g. learning base actions for locomotion objectives and learning arm actions for manipulation). This solution prevents simultaneous combinations of locomotion and interaction degrees of freedom and requires human domain knowledge for both partitioning the action space and matching the action parts to the sub-objectives. In this paper, we introduce Causal MoMa, a new reinforcement learning framework to train policies for typical MoMa tasks that makes use of the most favorable subspace of the robot's action space to address each sub-objective. Causal MoMa automatically discovers the causal dependencies between actions and terms of the reward function and exploits these dependencies through causal policy gradient that reduces gradient variance compared to previous state-of-the-art reinforcement learning algorithms, improving convergence and results. We evaluate the performance of Causal MoMa on three types of simulated robots across different MoMa tasks and demonstrate success in transferring the policies trained in simulation directly to a real robot, where our agent is able to follow moving goals and react to dynamic obstacles while simultaneously and synergistically controlling the whole-body: base, arm, and head. More information at https://sites.google.com/view/causal-moma.

A typical machine learning (ML) development cycle for edge computing is to maximise the performance during model training and then minimise the memory/area footprint of the trained model for deployment on edge devices targeting CPUs, GPUs, microcontrollers, or custom hardware accelerators. This paper proposes a methodology for automatically generating predictor circuits for classification of tabular data with comparable prediction performance to conventional ML techniques while using substantially fewer hardware resources and power. The proposed methodology uses an evolutionary algorithm to search over the space of logic gates and automatically generates a classifier circuit with maximised training prediction accuracy. Classifier circuits are so tiny (i.e., consisting of no more than 300 logic gates) that they are called "Tiny Classifier" circuits, and can efficiently be implemented in ASIC or on an FPGA. We empirically evaluate the automatic Tiny Classifier circuit generation methodology or "Auto Tiny Classifiers" on a wide range of tabular datasets, and compare it against conventional ML techniques such as Amazon's AutoGluon, Google's TabNet and a neural search over Multi-Layer Perceptrons. Despite Tiny Classifiers being constrained to a few hundred logic gates, we observe no statistically significant difference in prediction performance in comparison to the best-performing ML baseline. When synthesised as a Silicon chip, Tiny Classifiers use 8-18x less area and 4-8x less power. When implemented as an ultra-low cost chip on a flexible substrate (i.e., FlexIC), they occupy 10-75x less area and consume 13-75x less power compared to the most hardware-efficient ML baseline. On an FPGA, Tiny Classifiers consume 3-11x fewer resources.

We introduce RotateIt, a system that enables fingertip-based object rotation along multiple axes by leveraging multimodal sensory inputs. Our system is trained in simulation, where it has access to ground-truth object shapes and physical properties. Then we distill it to operate on realistic yet noisy simulated visuotactile and proprioceptive sensory inputs. These multimodal inputs are fused via a visuotactile transformer, enabling online inference of object shapes and physical properties during deployment. We show significant performance improvements over prior methods and the importance of visual and tactile sensing.

Accurate analysis of speech articulation is crucial for speech analysis. However, X-Y coordinates of articulators strongly depend on the anatomy of the speakers and the variability of pellet placements, and existing methods for mapping anatomical landmarks in the X-ray Microbeam Dataset (XRMB) fail to capture the entire anatomy of the vocal tract. In this paper, we propose a new geometric transformation that improves the accuracy of these measurements. Our transformation maps anatomical landmarks' X-Y coordinates along the midsagittal plane onto six relative measures: Lip Aperture (LA), Lip Protusion (LP), Tongue Body Constriction Location (TTCL), Degree (TBCD), Tongue Tip Constriction Location (TTCL) and Degree (TTCD). Our novel contribution is the extension of the palate trace towards the inferred anterior pharyngeal line, which improves measurements of tongue body constriction.

We prove a fundamental limitation on the efficiency of a wide class of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms. This limitation applies to model-free RL methods as well as a broad range of model-based methods, such as planning with tree search. Under an abstract definition of this class, we provide a family of RL problems for which these methods suffer a lower bound exponential in the horizon for their interactions with the environment to find an optimal behavior. However, there exists a method, not tailored to this specific family of problems, which can efficiently solve the problems in the family. In contrast, our limitation does not apply to several types of methods proposed in the literature, for instance, goal-conditioned methods or other algorithms that construct an inverse dynamics model.  ( 2 min )

Contrastive learning is a self-supervised representation learning framework, where two positive views generated through data augmentation are made similar by an attraction force in a data representation space, while a repulsive force makes them far from negative examples. Non-contrastive learning, represented by BYOL and SimSiam, further gets rid of negative examples and improves computational efficiency. While learned representations may collapse into a single point due to the lack of the repulsive force at first sight, Tian et al. (2021) revealed through the learning dynamics analysis that the representations can avoid collapse if data augmentation is sufficiently stronger than regularization. However, their analysis does not take into account commonly-used feature normalization, a normalizer before measuring the similarity of representations, and hence excessively strong regularization may collapse the dynamics, which is an unnatural behavior under the presence of feature normalization. Therefore, we extend the previous theory based on the L2 loss by considering the cosine loss, which involves feature normalization. We show that the cosine loss induces sixth-order dynamics (while the L2 loss induces a third-order one), in which a stable equilibrium dynamically emerges even if there are only collapsed solutions with given initial parameters. Thus, we offer a new understanding that feature normalization plays an important role in robustly preventing the dynamics collapse.

The $k$-means++ algorithm of Arthur and Vassilvitskii (SODA 2007) is often the practitioners' choice algorithm for optimizing the popular $k$-means clustering objective and is known to give an $O(\log k)$-approximation in expectation. To obtain higher quality solutions, Lattanzi and Sohler (ICML 2019) proposed augmenting $k$-means++ with $O(k \log \log k)$ local search steps obtained through the $k$-means++ sampling distribution to yield a $c$-approximation to the $k$-means clustering problem, where $c$ is a large absolute constant. Here we generalize and extend their local search algorithm by considering larger and more sophisticated local search neighborhoods hence allowing to swap multiple centers at the same time. Our algorithm achieves a $9 + \varepsilon$ approximation ratio, which is the best possible for local search. Importantly we show that our approach yields substantial practical improvements, we show significant quality improvements over the approach of Lattanzi and Sohler (ICML 2019) on several datasets.

We introduce the modified planar rotator method (MPRS), a physically inspired machine learning method for spatial/temporal regression. MPRS is a non-parametric model which incorporates spatial or temporal correlations via short-range, distance-dependent ``interactions'' without assuming a specific form for the underlying probability distribution. Predictions are obtained by means of a fully autonomous learning algorithm which employs equilibrium conditional Monte Carlo simulations. MPRS is able to handle scattered data and arbitrary spatial dimensions. We report tests on various synthetic and real-word data in one, two and three dimensions which demonstrate that the MPRS prediction performance (without parameter tuning) is competitive with standard interpolation methods such as ordinary kriging and inverse distance weighting. In particular, MPRS is a particularly effective gap-filling method for rough and non-Gaussian data (e.g., daily precipitation time series). MPRS shows superior computational efficiency and scalability for large samples. Massive data sets involving millions of nodes can be processed in a few seconds on a standard personal computer.

Parameter inference for dynamical models of (bio)physical systems remains a challenging problem. Intractable gradients, high-dimensional spaces, and non-linear model functions are typically problematic without large computational budgets. A recent body of work in that area has focused on Bayesian inference methods, which consider parameters under their statistical distributions and therefore, do not derive point estimates of optimal parameter values. Here we propose a new metaheuristic that drives dimensionality reductions from feature-informed transformations (DR-FFIT) to address these bottlenecks. DR-FFIT implements an efficient sampling strategy that facilitates a gradient-free parameter search in high-dimensional spaces. We use artificial neural networks to obtain differentiable proxies for the model's features of interest. The resulting gradients enable the estimation of a local active subspace of the model within a defined sampling region. This approach enables efficient dimensionality reductions of highly non-linear search spaces at a low computational cost. Our test data show that DR-FFIT boosts the performances of random-search and simulated-annealing against well-established metaheuristics, and improves the goodness-of-fit of the model, all within contained run-time costs.

In this study, we present a simple multi-channel framework for contrastive learning (MC-SimCLR) to encode 'what' and 'where' of spatial audios. MC-SimCLR learns joint spectral and spatial representations from unlabeled spatial audios, thereby enhancing both event classification and sound localization in downstream tasks. At its core, we propose a multi-level data augmentation pipeline that augments different levels of audio features, including waveforms, Mel spectrograms, and generalized cross-correlation (GCC) features. In addition, we introduce simple yet effective channel-wise augmentation methods to randomly swap the order of the microphones and mask Mel and GCC channels. By using these augmentations, we find that linear layers on top of the learned representation significantly outperform supervised models in terms of both event classification accuracy and localization error. We also perform a comprehensive analysis of the effect of each augmentation method and a comparison of the fine-tuning performance using different amounts of labeled data.

Computer vision research has long aimed to build systems that are robust to spatial transformations found in natural data. Traditionally, this is done using data augmentation or hard-coding invariances into the architecture. However, too much or too little invariance can hurt, and the correct amount is unknown a priori and dependent on the instance. Ideally, the appropriate invariance would be learned from data and inferred at test-time. We treat invariance as a prediction problem. Given any image, we use a normalizing flow to predict a distribution over transformations and average the predictions over them. Since this distribution only depends on the instance, we can align instances before classifying them and generalize invariance across classes. The same distribution can also be used to adapt to out-of-distribution poses. This normalizing flow is trained end-to-end and can learn a much larger range of transformations than Augerino and InstaAug. When used as data augmentation, our method shows accuracy and robustness gains on CIFAR 10, CIFAR10-LT, and TinyImageNet.

Counterfactual explanations, and their associated algorithmic recourse, are typically leveraged to understand, explain, and potentially alter a prediction coming from a black-box classifier. In this paper, we propose to extend the use of counterfactuals to evaluate progress in sequential decision making tasks. To this end, we introduce a model-agnostic modular framework, TraCE (Trajectory Counterfactual Explanation) scores, which is able to distill and condense progress in highly complex scenarios into a single value. We demonstrate TraCE's utility across domains by showcasing its main properties in two case studies spanning healthcare and climate change.

We present Any-Modality Augmented Language Model (AnyMAL), a unified model that reasons over diverse input modality signals (i.e. text, image, video, audio, IMU motion sensor), and generates textual responses. AnyMAL inherits the powerful text-based reasoning abilities of the state-of-the-art LLMs including LLaMA-2 (70B), and converts modality-specific signals to the joint textual space through a pre-trained aligner module. To further strengthen the multimodal LLM's capabilities, we fine-tune the model with a multimodal instruction set manually collected to cover diverse topics and tasks beyond simple QAs. We conduct comprehensive empirical analysis comprising both human and automatic evaluations, and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance on various multimodal tasks.

Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a promising framework for learning policies without active interactions, making it especially appealing for autonomous driving tasks. Recent successes of Transformers inspire casting offline RL as sequence modeling, which performs well in long-horizon tasks. However, they are overly optimistic in stochastic environments with incorrect assumptions that the same goal can be consistently achieved by identical actions. In this paper, we introduce an UNcertainty-awaRE deciSion Transformer (UNREST) for planning in stochastic driving environments without introducing additional transition or complex generative models. Specifically, UNREST estimates state uncertainties by the conditional mutual information between transitions and returns, and segments sequences accordingly. Discovering the `uncertainty accumulation' and `temporal locality' properties of driving environments, UNREST replaces the global returns in decision transformers with less uncertain truncated returns, to learn from true outcomes of agent actions rather than environment transitions. We also dynamically evaluate environmental uncertainty during inference for cautious planning. Extensive experimental results demonstrate UNREST's superior performance in various driving scenarios and the power of our uncertainty estimation strategy.

The recent criticisms of the robustness of post hoc model approximation explanation methods (like LIME and SHAP) have led to the rise of model-precise abductive explanations. For each data point, abductive explanations provide a minimal subset of features that are sufficient to generate the outcome. While theoretically sound and rigorous, abductive explanations suffer from a major issue -- there can be several valid abductive explanations for the same data point. In such cases, providing a single abductive explanation can be insufficient; on the other hand, providing all valid abductive explanations can be incomprehensible due to their size. In this work, we solve this issue by aggregating the many possible abductive explanations into feature importance scores. We propose three aggregation methods: two based on power indices from cooperative game theory and a third based on a well-known measure of causal strength. We characterize these three methods axiomatically, showing that each of them uniquely satisfies a set of desirable properties. We also evaluate them on multiple datasets and show that these explanations are robust to the attacks that fool SHAP and LIME.

Consider an unknown nonlinear dynamical system that is known to be dissipative. The objective of this paper is to learn a neural dynamical model that approximates this system, while preserving the dissipativity property in the model. In general, imposing dissipativity constraints during neural network training is a hard problem for which no known techniques exist. In this work, we address the problem of learning a dissipative neural dynamical system model in two stages. First, we learn an unconstrained neural dynamical model that closely approximates the system dynamics. Next, we derive sufficient conditions to perturb the weights of the neural dynamical model to ensure dissipativity, followed by perturbation of the biases to retain the fit of the model to the trajectories of the nonlinear system. We show that these two perturbation problems can be solved independently to obtain a neural dynamical model that is guaranteed to be dissipative while closely approximating the nonlinear system.

Large pre-trained language models have demonstrated their proficiency in storing factual knowledge within their parameters and achieving remarkable results when fine-tuned for downstream natural language processing tasks. Nonetheless, their capacity to access and manipulate knowledge with precision remains constrained, resulting in performance disparities on knowledge-intensive tasks when compared to task-specific architectures. Additionally, the challenges of providing provenance for model decisions and maintaining up-to-date world knowledge persist as open research frontiers. To address these limitations, the integration of pre-trained models with differentiable access mechanisms to explicit non-parametric memory emerges as a promising solution. This survey delves into the realm of language models (LMs) augmented with the ability to tap into external knowledge sources, including external knowledge bases and search engines. While adhering to the standard objective of predicting missing tokens, these augmented LMs leverage diverse, possibly non-parametric external modules to augment their contextual processing capabilities, departing from the conventional language modeling paradigm. Through an exploration of current advancements in augmenting large language models with knowledge, this work concludes that this emerging research direction holds the potential to address prevalent issues in traditional LMs, such as hallucinations, un-grounded responses, and scalability challenges.

To leverage training data for the sufficient training of ML models from multiple parties in a confidentiality-preserving way, various collaborative distributed machine learning (CDML) system designs have been developed, for example, to perform assisted learning, federated learning, and split learning. CDML system designs show different traits, for example, high agent autonomy, machine learning (ML) model confidentiality, and fault tolerance. Facing a wide variety of CDML system designs with different traits, it is difficult for developers to design CDML systems with traits that match use case requirements in a targeted way. However, inappropriate CDML system designs may result in CDML systems failing their envisioned purposes. We developed a CDML design toolbox that can guide the development of CDML systems. Based on the CDML design toolbox, we present CDML system archetypes with distinct key traits that can support the design of CDML systems to meet use case requirements.

Training high-quality instance segmentation models requires an abundance of labeled images with instance masks and classifications, which is often expensive to procure. Active learning addresses this challenge by striving for optimum performance with minimal labeling cost by selecting the most informative and representative images for labeling. Despite its potential, active learning has been less explored in instance segmentation compared to other tasks like image classification, which require less labeling. In this study, we propose a post-hoc active learning algorithm that integrates uncertainty-based sampling with diversity-based sampling. Our proposed algorithm is not only simple and easy to implement, but it also delivers superior performance on various datasets. Its practical application is demonstrated on a real-world overhead imagery dataset, where it increases the labeling efficiency fivefold.

Currently, reinforcement learning (RL), especially deep RL, has received more and more attention in the research area. However, the security of RL has been an obvious problem due to the attack manners becoming mature. In order to defend against such adversarial attacks, several practical approaches are developed, such as adversarial training, data filtering, etc. However, these methods are mostly based on empirical algorithms and experiments, without rigorous theoretical analysis of the robustness of the algorithms. In this paper, we develop an algorithm to certify the robustness of a given policy offline with random smoothing, which could be proven and conducted as efficiently as ones without random smoothing. Experiments on different environments confirm the correctness of our algorithm.

We study infinite limits of neural network quantum states ($\infty$-NNQS), which exhibit representation power through ensemble statistics, and also tractable gradient descent dynamics. Ensemble averages of Renyi entropies are expressed in terms of neural network correlators, and architectures that exhibit volume-law entanglement are presented. A general framework is developed for studying the gradient descent dynamics of neural network quantum states (NNQS), using a quantum state neural tangent kernel (QS-NTK). For $\infty$-NNQS the training dynamics is simplified, since the QS-NTK becomes deterministic and constant. An analytic solution is derived for quantum state supervised learning, which allows an $\infty$-NNQS to recover any target wavefunction. Numerical experiments on finite and infinite NNQS in the transverse field Ising model and Fermi Hubbard model demonstrate excellent agreement with theory. $\infty$-NNQS opens up new opportunities for studying entanglement and training dynamics in other physics applications, such as in finding ground states.

Knowledge graphs (KGs) are gaining prominence in Healthcare AI, especially in drug discovery and pharmaceutical research as they provide a structured way to integrate diverse information sources, enhancing AI system interpretability. This interpretability is crucial in healthcare, where trust and transparency matter, and eXplainable AI (XAI) supports decision making for healthcare professionals. This overview summarizes recent literature on the impact of KGs in healthcare and their role in developing explainable AI models. We cover KG workflow, including construction, relationship extraction, reasoning, and their applications in areas like Drug-Drug Interactions (DDI), Drug Target Interactions (DTI), Drug Development (DD), Adverse Drug Reactions (ADR), and bioinformatics. We emphasize the importance of making KGs more interpretable through knowledge-infused learning in healthcare. Finally, we highlight research challenges and provide insights for future directions.

The cost of hyperparameter tuning in deep learning has been rising with model sizes, prompting practitioners to find new tuning methods using a proxy of smaller networks. One such proposal uses $\mu$P parameterized networks, where the optimal hyperparameters for small width networks transfer to networks with arbitrarily large width. However, in this scheme, hyperparameters do not transfer across depths. As a remedy, we study residual networks with a residual branch scale of $1/\sqrt{\text{depth}}$ in combination with the $\mu$P parameterization. We provide experiments demonstrating that residual architectures including convolutional ResNets and Vision Transformers trained with this parameterization exhibit transfer of optimal hyperparameters across width and depth on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. Furthermore, our empirical findings are supported and motivated by theory. Using recent developments in the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) description of neural network learning dynamics, we show that this parameterization of ResNets admits a well-defined feature learning joint infinite-width and infinite-depth limit and show convergence of finite-size network dynamics towards this limit.

Recent advancements in Cryo-EM and protein structure prediction algorithms have made large-scale protein structures accessible, paving the way for machine learning-based functional annotations.The field of geometric deep learning focuses on creating methods working on geometric data. An essential aspect of learning from protein structures is representing these structures as a geometric object (be it a grid, graph, or surface) and applying a learning method tailored to this representation. The performance of a given approach will then depend on both the representation and its corresponding learning method. In this paper, we investigate representing proteins as $\textit{3D mesh surfaces}$ and incorporate them into an established representation benchmark. Our first finding is that despite promising preliminary results, the surface representation alone does not seem competitive with 3D grids. Building on this, we introduce a synergistic approach, combining surface representations with graph-based methods, resulting in a general framework that incorporates both representations in learning. We show that using this combination, we are able to obtain state-of-the-art results across $\textit{all tested tasks}$. Our code and data can be found online: https://github.com/Vincentx15/atom2D .

This brief addresses the design of a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) strategy for exponentially incremental Input-to-State Stable (ISS) systems. In particular, a novel formulation is devised, which does not necessitate the onerous computation of terminal ingredients, but rather relies on the explicit definition of a minimum prediction horizon ensuring closed-loop stability. The designed methodology is particularly suited for the control of systems learned by Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), which are known for their enhanced modeling capabilities and for which the incremental ISS properties can be studied thanks to simple algebraic conditions. The approach is applied to Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) networks, providing also a method for the design of a tailored state observer with convergence guarantees. The resulting control architecture is tested on a benchmark system, demonstrating its good control performances and efficient applicability.

Eosinophilic Esophagitis (EoE) is an allergic condition increasing in prevalence. To diagnose EoE, pathologists must find 15 or more eosinophils within a single high-power field (400X magnification). Determining whether or not a patient has EoE can be an arduous process and any medical imaging approaches used to assist diagnosis must consider both efficiency and precision. We propose an improvement of Adorno et al's approach for quantifying eosinphils using deep image segmentation. Our new approach leverages Monte Carlo Dropout, a common approach in deep learning to reduce overfitting, to provide uncertainty quantification on current deep learning models. The uncertainty can be visualized in an output image to evaluate model performance, provide insight to how deep learning algorithms function, and assist pathologists in identifying eosinophils.

Progress in hybrid physics-machine learning (ML) climate simulations has been limited by the difficulty of obtaining performant coupled (i.e. online) simulations. While evaluating hundreds of ML parameterizations of subgrid closures (here of convection and radiation) offline is straightforward, online evaluation at the same scale is technically challenging. Our software automation achieves an order-of-magnitude larger sampling of online modeling errors than has previously been examined. Using this, we evaluate the hybrid climate model performance and define strategies to improve it. We show that model online performance improves when incorporating memory, a relative humidity input feature transformation, and additional input variables. We also reveal substantial variation in online error and inconsistencies between offline vs. online error statistics. The implication is that hundreds of candidate ML models should be evaluated online to detect the effects of parameterization design choices. This is considerably more sampling than tends to be reported in the current literature.

Searching for available parking spots in high-density urban centers is a stressful task for drivers that can be mitigated by systems that know in advance the nearest parking space available. To this end, image-based systems offer cost advantages over other sensor-based alternatives (e.g., ultrasonic sensors), requiring less physical infrastructure for installation and maintenance. Despite recent deep learning advances, deploying intelligent parking monitoring is still a challenge since most approaches involve collecting and labeling large amounts of data, which is laborious and time-consuming. Our study aims to uncover the challenges in creating a global framework, trained using publicly available labeled parking lot images, that performs accurately across diverse scenarios, enabling the parking space monitoring as a ready-to-use system to deploy in a new environment. Through exhaustive experiments involving different datasets and deep learning architectures, including fusion strategies and ensemble methods, we found that models trained on diverse datasets can achieve 95\% accuracy without the burden of data annotation and model training on the target parking lot

This paper identifies and addresses dynamic selection problems in online learning algorithms with endogenous data. In a contextual multi-armed bandit model, a novel bias (self-fulfilling bias) arises because the endogeneity of the data influences the choices of decisions, affecting the distribution of future data to be collected and analyzed. We propose an instrumental-variable-based algorithm to correct for the bias. It obtains true parameter values and attains low (logarithmic-like) regret levels. We also prove a central limit theorem for statistical inference. To establish the theoretical properties, we develop a general technique that untangles the interdependence between data and actions.

High-resolution aerial imagery allows fine details in the segmentation of farmlands. However, small objects and features introduce distortions to the delineation of object boundaries, and larger contextual views are needed to mitigate class confusion. In this work, we present an end-to-end trainable network for segmenting farmlands with contour levees from high-resolution aerial imagery. A fusion block is devised that includes multiple voting blocks to achieve image segmentation and classification. We integrate the fusion block with a backbone and produce both semantic predictions and segmentation slices. The segmentation slices are used to perform majority voting on the predictions. The network is trained to assign the most likely class label of a segment to its pixels, learning the concept of farmlands rather than analyzing constitutive pixels separately. We evaluate our method using images from the National Agriculture Imagery Program. Our method achieved an average accuracy of 94.34\%. Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, the proposed method obtains an improvement of 6.96% and 2.63% in the F1 score on average.

Prediction with the possibility of abstention (or selective prediction) is an important problem for error-critical machine learning applications. While well-studied in the classification setup, selective approaches to regression are much less developed. In this work, we consider the nonparametric heteroskedastic regression problem and develop an abstention procedure via testing the hypothesis on the value of the conditional variance at a given point. Unlike existing methods, the proposed one allows to account not only for the value of the variance itself but also for the uncertainty of the corresponding variance predictor. We prove non-asymptotic bounds on the risk of the resulting estimator and show the existence of several different convergence regimes. Theoretical analysis is illustrated with a series of experiments on simulated and real-world data.

In recent years, advances in the large-scale pretraining of language and text-to-image models have revolutionized the field of machine learning. Yet, integrating these two modalities into a single, robust model capable of generating seamless multimodal outputs remains a significant challenge. To address this gap, we present the Joint Autoregressive Mixture (JAM) framework, a modular approach that systematically fuses existing text and image generation models. We also introduce a specialized, data-efficient instruction-tuning strategy, tailored for mixed-modal generation tasks. Our final instruct-tuned model demonstrates unparalleled performance in generating high-quality multimodal outputs and represents the first model explicitly designed for this purpose.

Enabling robots to effectively imitate expert skills in longhorizon tasks such as locomotion, manipulation, and more, poses a long-standing challenge. Existing imitation learning (IL) approaches for robots still grapple with sub-optimal performance in complex tasks. In this paper, we consider how this challenge can be addressed within the human cognitive priors. Heuristically, we extend the usual notion of action to a dual Cognition (high-level)-Action (low-level) architecture by introducing intuitive human cognitive priors, and propose a novel skill IL framework through human-robot interaction, called Cognition-Action-based Skill Imitation Learning (CasIL), for the robotic agent to effectively cognize and imitate the critical skills from raw visual demonstrations. CasIL enables both cognition and action imitation, while high-level skill cognition explicitly guides low-level primitive actions, providing robustness and reliability to the entire skill IL process. We evaluated our method on MuJoCo and RLBench benchmarks, as well as on the obstacle avoidance and point-goal navigation tasks for quadrupedal robot locomotion. Experimental results show that our CasIL consistently achieves competitive and robust skill imitation capability compared to other counterparts in a variety of long-horizon robotic tasks.

Daily fantasy sports (DFS) are weekly or daily online contests where real-game performances of individual players are converted to fantasy points (FPTS). Users select players for their lineup to maximize their FPTS within a set player salary cap. This paper focuses on (1) the development of a method to forecast NFL player performance under uncertainty and (2) determining an optimal lineup to maximize FPTS under a set salary limit. A supervised learning neural network was created and used to project FPTS based on past player performance (2018 NFL regular season for this work) prior to the upcoming week. These projected FPTS were used in a mixed integer linear program to find the optimal lineup. The performance of resultant lineups was compared to randomly-created lineups. On average, the optimal lineups outperformed the random lineups. The generated lineups were then compared to real-world lineups from users on DraftKings. The generated lineups generally fell in approximately the 31st percentile (median). The FPTS methods and predictions presented here can be further improved using this study as a baseline comparison.

Most knowledge graph completion (KGC) methods learn latent representations of entities and relations of a given graph by mapping them into a vector space. Although the majority of these methods focus on static knowledge graphs, a large number of publicly available KGs contain temporal information stating the time instant/period over which a certain fact has been true. Such graphs are often known as temporal knowledge graphs. Furthermore, knowledge graphs may also contain textual descriptions of entities and relations. Both temporal information and textual descriptions are not taken into account during representation learning by static KGC methods, and only structural information of the graph is leveraged. Recently, some studies have used temporal information to improve link prediction, yet they do not exploit textual descriptions and do not support inductive inference (prediction on entities that have not been seen in training). We propose a novel framework called TEMT that exploits the power of pre-trained language models (PLMs) for text-enhanced temporal knowledge graph completion. The knowledge stored in the parameters of a PLM allows TEMT to produce rich semantic representations of facts and to generalize on previously unseen entities. TEMT leverages textual and temporal information available in a KG, treats them separately, and fuses them to get plausibility scores of facts. Unlike previous approaches, TEMT effectively captures dependencies across different time points and enables predictions on unseen entities. To assess the performance of TEMT, we carried out several experiments including time interval prediction, both in transductive and inductive settings, and triple classification. The experimental results show that TEMT is competitive with the state-of-the-art.

Bayesian optimization (BO), while proved highly effective for many black-box function optimization tasks, requires practitioners to carefully select priors that well model their functions of interest. Rather than specifying by hand, researchers have investigated transfer learning based methods to automatically learn the priors, e.g. multi-task BO (Swersky et al., 2013), few-shot BO (Wistuba and Grabocka, 2021) and HyperBO (Wang et al., 2022). However, those prior learning methods typically assume that the input domains are the same for all tasks, weakening their ability to use observations on functions with different domains or generalize the learned priors to BO on different search spaces. In this work, we present HyperBO+: a pre-training approach for hierarchical Gaussian processes that enables the same prior to work universally for Bayesian optimization on functions with different domains. We propose a two-step pre-training method and analyze its appealing asymptotic properties and benefits to BO both theoretically and empirically. On real-world hyperparameter tuning tasks that involve multiple search spaces, we demonstrate that HyperBO+ is able to generalize to unseen search spaces and achieves lower regrets than competitive baselines.

An emerging direction of quantum computing is to establish meaningful quantum applications in various fields of artificial intelligence, including natural language processing (NLP). Although some efforts based on syntactic analysis have opened the door to research in Quantum NLP (QNLP), limitations such as heavy syntactic preprocessing and syntax-dependent network architecture make them impracticable on larger and real-world data sets. In this paper, we propose a new simple network architecture, called the quantum self-attention neural network (QSANN), which can compensate for these limitations. Specifically, we introduce the self-attention mechanism into quantum neural networks and then utilize a Gaussian projected quantum self-attention serving as a sensible quantum version of self-attention. As a result, QSANN is effective and scalable on larger data sets and has the desirable property of being implementable on near-term quantum devices. In particular, our QSANN outperforms the best existing QNLP model based on syntactic analysis as well as a simple classical self-attention neural network in numerical experiments of text classification tasks on public data sets. We further show that our method exhibits robustness to low-level quantum noises and showcases resilience to quantum neural network architectures.

Unsupervised learning allows us to leverage unlabelled data, which has become abundantly available, and to create embeddings that are usable on a variety of downstream tasks. However, the typical lack of interpretability of unsupervised representation learning has become a limiting factor with regard to recent transparent-AI regulations. In this paper, we study graph representation learning and we show that data augmentation that preserves semantics can be learned and used to produce interpretations. Our framework, which we named INGENIOUS, creates inherently interpretable embeddings and eliminates the need for costly additional post-hoc analysis. We also introduce additional metrics addressing the lack of formalism and metrics in the understudied area of unsupervised-representation learning interpretability. Our results are supported by an experimental study applied to both graph-level and node-level tasks and show that interpretable embeddings provide state-of-the-art performance on subsequent downstream tasks.

Unsupervised fact verification aims to verify a claim using evidence from a trustworthy knowledge base without any kind of data annotation. To address this challenge, algorithms must produce features for every claim that are both semantically meaningful, and compact enough to find a semantic alignment with the source information. In contrast to previous work, which tackled the alignment problem by learning over annotated corpora of claims and their corresponding labels, we propose SFAVEL (Self-supervised Fact Verification via Language Model Distillation), a novel unsupervised framework that leverages pre-trained language models to distil self-supervised features into high-quality claim-fact alignments without the need for annotations. This is enabled by a novel contrastive loss function that encourages features to attain high-quality claim and evidence alignments whilst preserving the semantic relationships across the corpora. Notably, we present results that achieve a new state-of-the-art on the standard FEVER fact verification benchmark (+8% accuracy) with linear evaluation.

In, Elmarakeby et al., "Biologically informed deep neural network for prostate cancer discovery", a feedforward neural network with biologically informed, sparse connections (P-NET) was presented to model the state of prostate cancer. We verified the reproducibility of the study conducted by Elmarakeby et al., using both their original codebase, and our own re-implementation using more up-to-date libraries. We quantified the contribution of network sparsification by Reactome biological pathways, and confirmed its importance to P-NET's superior performance. Furthermore, we explored alternative neural architectures and approaches to incorporating biological information into the networks. We experimented with three types of graph neural networks on the same training data, and investigated the clinical prediction agreement between different models. Our analyses demonstrated that deep neural networks with distinct architectures make incorrect predictions for individual patient that are persistent across different initializations of a specific neural architecture. This suggests that different neural architectures are sensitive to different aspects of the data, an important yet under-explored challenge for clinical prediction tasks.

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic accentuated the need for access to biomedical literature to answer timely and disease-specific questions. During the early days of the pandemic, one of the biggest challenges we faced was the lack of peer-reviewed biomedical articles on COVID-19 that could be used to train machine learning models for question answering (QA). In this paper, we explore the roles weak supervision and data augmentation play in training deep neural network QA models. First, we investigate whether labels generated automatically from the structured abstracts of scholarly papers using an information retrieval algorithm, BM25, provide a weak supervision signal to train an extractive QA model. We also curate new QA pairs using information retrieval techniques, guided by the clinicaltrials.gov schema and the structured abstracts of articles, in the absence of annotated data from biomedical domain experts. Furthermore, we explore augmenting the training data of a deep neural network model with linguistic features from external sources such as lexical databases to account for variations in word morphology and meaning. To better utilize our training data, we apply curriculum learning to domain adaptation, fine-tuning our QA model in stages based on characteristics of the QA pairs. We evaluate our methods in the context of QA models at the core of a system to answer questions about COVID-19.

Background: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is one of the most common cardiac arrhythmias that affects millions of people each year worldwide and it is closely linked to increased risk of cardiovascular diseases such as stroke and heart failure. Machine learning methods have shown promising results in evaluating the risk of developing atrial fibrillation from the electrocardiogram. We aim to develop and evaluate one such algorithm on a large CODE dataset collected in Brazil. Results: The deep neural network model identified patients without indication of AF in the presented ECG but who will develop AF in the future with an AUC score of 0.845. From our survival model, we obtain that patients in the high-risk group (i.e. with the probability of a future AF case being greater than 0.7) are 50% more likely to develop AF within 40 weeks, while patients belonging to the minimal-risk group (i.e. with the probability of a future AF case being less than or equal to 0.1) have more than 85% chance of remaining AF free up until after seven years. Conclusion: We developed and validated a model for AF risk prediction. If applied in clinical practice, the model possesses the potential of providing valuable and useful information in decision-making and patient management processes.

Decoding memory content from brain activity during sleep has long been a goal in neuroscience. While spontaneous reactivation of memories during sleep in rodents is known to support memory consolidation and offline learning, capturing memory replay in humans is challenging due to the absence of well-annotated sleep datasets and the substantial differences in neural patterns between wakefulness and sleep. To address these challenges, we designed a novel cognitive neuroscience experiment and collected a comprehensive, well-annotated electroencephalography (EEG) dataset from 52 subjects during both wakefulness and sleep. Leveraging this benchmark dataset, we developed the Universal Sleep Decoder (USD) to align neural representations between wakefulness and sleep across subjects. Our model achieves up to 16.6% top-1 zero-shot accuracy on unseen subjects, comparable to decoding performances using individual sleep data. Furthermore, fine-tuning USD on test subjects enhances decoding accuracy to 25.9% top-1 accuracy, a substantial improvement over the baseline chance of 6.7%. Model comparison and ablation analyses reveal that our design choices, including the use of (i) an additional contrastive objective to integrate awake and sleep neural signals and (ii) the pretrain-finetune paradigm to incorporate different subjects, significantly contribute to these performances. Collectively, our findings and methodologies represent a significant advancement in the field of sleep decoding.

Robots with increasing autonomy progress our space exploration capabilities, particularly for in-situ exploration and sampling to stand in for human explorers. Currently, humans drive robots to meet scientific objectives, but depending on the robot's location, the exchange of information and driving commands between the human operator and robot may cause undue delays in mission fulfillment. An autonomous robot encoded with a scientific objective and an exploration strategy incurs no communication delays and can fulfill missions more quickly. Active learning algorithms offer this capability of intelligent exploration, but the underlying model structure varies the performance of the active learning algorithm in accurately forming an understanding of the environment. In this paper, we investigate the performance differences between active learning algorithms driven by Gaussian processes or Bayesian neural networks for exploration strategies encoded on agents that are constrained in their trajectories, like planetary surface rovers. These two active learning strategies were tested in a simulation environment against science-blind strategies to predict the spatial distribution of a variable of interest along multiple datasets. The performance metrics of interest are model accuracy in root mean squared (RMS) error, training time, model convergence, total distance traveled until convergence, and total samples until convergence. Active learning strategies encoded with Gaussian processes require less computation to train, converge to an accurate model more quickly, and propose trajectories of shorter distance, except in a few complex environments in which Bayesian neural networks achieve a more accurate model in the large data regime due to their more expressive functional bases. The paper concludes with advice on when and how to implement either exploration strategy for future space missions.

Additive manufacturing has revolutionized the manufacturing of complex parts by enabling direct material joining and offers several advantages such as cost-effective manufacturing of complex parts, reducing manufacturing waste, and opening new possibilities for manufacturing automation. One group of materials for which additive manufacturing holds great potential for enhancing component performance and properties is Functionally Graded Materials (FGMs). FGMs are advanced composite materials that exhibit smoothly varying properties making them desirable for applications in aerospace, automobile, biomedical, and defense industries. Such composition differs from traditional composite materials, since the location-dependent composition changes gradually in FGMs, leading to enhanced properties. Recently, machine learning techniques have emerged as a promising means for fabrication of FGMs through optimizing processing parameters, improving product quality, and detecting manufacturing defects. This paper first provides a brief literature review of works related to FGM fabrication, followed by reviewing works on employing machine learning in additive manufacturing, Afterward, we provide an overview of published works in the literature related to the application of machine learning methods in Directed Energy Deposition and for fabrication of FGMs.

Recent advances in federated learning (FL) enable collaborative training of machine learning (ML) models from large-scale and widely dispersed clients while protecting their privacy. However, when different clients' datasets are heterogeneous, traditional FL mechanisms produce a global model that does not adequately represent the poorer clients with limited data resources, resulting in lower accuracy and higher bias on their local data. According to the Matthew effect, which describes how the advantaged gain more advantage and the disadvantaged lose more over time, deploying such a global model in client applications may worsen the resource disparity among the clients and harm the principles of social welfare and fairness. To mitigate the Matthew effect, we propose Egalitarian Fairness Federated Learning (EFFL), where egalitarian fairness refers to the global model learned from FL has: (1) equal accuracy among clients; (2) equal decision bias among clients. Besides achieving egalitarian fairness among the clients, EFFL also aims for performance optimality, minimizing the empirical risk loss and the bias for each client; both are essential for any ML model training, whether centralized or decentralized. We formulate EFFL as a constrained multi-constrained multi-objectives optimization (MCMOO) problem, with the decision bias and egalitarian fairness as constraints and the minimization of the empirical risk losses on all clients as multiple objectives to be optimized. We propose a gradient-based three-stage algorithm to obtain the Pareto optimal solutions within the constraint space. Extensive experiments demonstrate that EFFL outperforms other state-of-the-art FL algorithms in achieving a high-performance global model with enhanced egalitarian fairness among all clients.

We present task-oriented Koopman-based control that utilizes end-to-end reinforcement learning and contrastive encoder to simultaneously learn the Koopman latent embedding, operator and associated linear controller within an iterative loop. By prioritizing the task cost as main objective for controller learning, we reduce the reliance of controller design on a well-identified model, which extends Koopman control beyond low-dimensional systems to high-dimensional, complex nonlinear systems, including pixel-based scenarios.

Despite their success, Machine Learning (ML) models do not generalize effectively to data not originating from the training distribution. To reliably employ ML models in real-world healthcare systems and avoid inaccurate predictions on out-of-distribution (OOD) data, it is crucial to detect OOD samples. Numerous OOD detection approaches have been suggested in other fields - especially in computer vision - but it remains unclear whether the challenge is resolved when dealing with medical tabular data. To answer this pressing need, we propose an extensive reproducible benchmark to compare different methods across a suite of tests including both near and far OODs. Our benchmark leverages the latest versions of eICU and MIMIC-IV, two public datasets encompassing tens of thousands of ICU patients in several hospitals. We consider a wide array of density-based methods and SOTA post-hoc detectors across diverse predictive architectures, including MLP, ResNet, and Transformer. Our findings show that i) the problem appears to be solved for far-OODs, but remains open for near-OODs; ii) post-hoc methods alone perform poorly, but improve substantially when coupled with distance-based mechanisms; iii) the transformer architecture is far less overconfident compared to MLP and ResNet.

High training costs of generative models and the need to fine-tune them for specific tasks have created a strong interest in model reuse and composition. A key challenge in composing iterative generative processes, such as GFlowNets and diffusion models, is that to realize the desired target distribution, all steps of the generative process need to be coordinated, and satisfy delicate balance conditions. In this work, we propose Compositional Sculpting: a general approach for defining compositions of iterative generative processes. We then introduce a method for sampling from these compositions built on classifier guidance. We showcase ways to accomplish compositional sculpting in both GFlowNets and diffusion models. We highlight two binary operations $\unicode{x2014}$ the harmonic mean ($p_1 \otimes p_2$) and the contrast ($p_1 \unicode{x25D1}\,p_2$) between pairs, and the generalization of these operations to multiple component distributions. We offer empirical results on image and molecular generation tasks.  ( 2 min )

Copulas are a powerful statistical tool that captures dependencies across data dimensions. When applying Copulas, we can estimate multivariate distribution functions by initially estimating independent marginals, an easy task, and then a single copulating function, $C$, to connect the marginals, a hard task. For two-dimensional data, a copula is a two-increasing function of the form $C: (u,v)\in \mathbf{I}^2 \rightarrow \mathbf{I}$, where $\mathbf{I} = [0, 1]$. In this paper, we show how Neural Networks (NNs) can approximate any two-dimensional copula non-parametrically. Our approach, denoted as 2-Cats, is inspired by the Physics-Informed Neural Networks and Sobolev Training literature. Not only do we show that we can estimate the output of a 2d Copula better than the state-of-the-art, our approach is non-parametric and respects the mathematical properties of a Copula $C$.

Machine learning has been successfully applied to grid-based PDE modeling in various scientific applications. However, learned PDE solvers based on Lagrangian particle discretizations, which are the preferred approach to problems with free surfaces or complex physics, remain largely unexplored. We present LagrangeBench, the first benchmarking suite for Lagrangian particle problems, focusing on temporal coarse-graining. In particular, our contribution is: (a) seven new fluid mechanics datasets (four in 2D and three in 3D) generated with the Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) method including the Taylor-Green vortex, lid-driven cavity, reverse Poiseuille flow, and dam break, each of which includes different physics like solid wall interactions or free surface, (b) efficient JAX-based API with various recent training strategies and neighbors search routine, and (c) JAX implementation of established Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) like GNS and SEGNN with baseline results. Finally, to measure the performance of learned surrogates we go beyond established position errors and introduce physical metrics like kinetic energy MSE and Sinkhorn distance for the particle distribution. Our codebase is available under the URL: https://github.com/tumaer/lagrangebench

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular black-box function optimization method, which makes sequential decisions based on a Bayesian model, typically a Gaussian process (GP), of the function. To ensure the quality of the model, transfer learning approaches have been developed to automatically design GP priors by learning from observations on "training" functions. These training functions are typically required to have the same domain as the "test" function (black-box function to be optimized). In this paper, we introduce MPHD, a model pre-training method on heterogeneous domains, which uses a neural net mapping from domain-specific contexts to specifications of hierarchical GPs. MPHD can be seamlessly integrated with BO to transfer knowledge across heterogeneous search spaces. Our theoretical and empirical results demonstrate the validity of MPHD and its superior performance on challenging black-box function optimization tasks.

The increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) raise opportunities for artificial general intelligence but concurrently amplify safety concerns, such as potential misuse of AI systems, necessitating effective AI alignment. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a promising pathway towards AI alignment but brings forth challenges due to its complexity and dependence on a separate reward model. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been proposed as an alternative, and it remains equivalent to RLHF under the reverse KL regularization constraint. This paper presents $f$-DPO, a generalized approach to DPO by incorporating diverse divergence constraints. We show that under certain $f$-divergences, including Jensen-Shannon divergence, forward KL divergences and $\alpha$-divergences, the complex relationship between the reward and optimal policy can also be simplified by addressing the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions. This eliminates the need for estimating the normalizing constant in the Bradley-Terry model and enables a tractable mapping between the reward function and the optimal policy. Our approach optimizes LLMs to align with human preferences in a more efficient and supervised manner under a broad set of divergence constraints. Empirically, adopting these divergences ensures a balance between alignment performance and generation diversity. Importantly, $f$-DPO outperforms PPO-based methods in divergence efficiency, and divergence constraints directly influence expected calibration error (ECE).

Differential Privacy has become a widely popular method for data protection in machine learning, especially since it allows formulating strict mathematical privacy guarantees. This survey provides an overview of the state-of-the-art of differentially private centralized deep learning, thorough analyses of recent advances and open problems, as well as a discussion of potential future developments in the field. Based on a systematic literature review, the following topics are addressed: auditing and evaluation methods for private models, improvements of privacy-utility trade-offs, protection against a broad range of threats and attacks, differentially private generative models, and emerging application domains.

Time series data can be found in almost every domain, ranging from the medical field to manufacturing and wireless communication. Generating realistic and useful exemplars and prototypes is a fundamental data analysis task. In this paper, we investigate a novel approach to generating realistic and useful exemplars and prototypes for time series data. Our approach uses a new form of time series average, the ShapeDTW Barycentric Average. We therefore turn our attention to accurately generating time series prototypes with a novel approach. The existing time series prototyping approaches rely on the Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) similarity measure such as DTW Barycentering Average (DBA) and SoftDBA. These last approaches suffer from a common problem of generating out-of-distribution artifacts in their prototypes. This is mostly caused by the DTW variant used and its incapability of detecting neighborhood similarities, instead it detects absolute similarities. Our proposed method, ShapeDBA, uses the ShapeDTW variant of DTW, that overcomes this issue. We chose time series clustering, a popular form of time series analysis to evaluate the outcome of ShapeDBA compared to the other prototyping approaches. Coupled with the k-means clustering algorithm, and evaluated on a total of 123 datasets from the UCR archive, our proposed averaging approach is able to achieve new state-of-the-art results in terms of Adjusted Rand Index.

Neural networks have achieved remarkable performance across various problem domains, but their widespread applicability is hindered by inherent limitations such as overconfidence in predictions, lack of interpretability, and vulnerability to adversarial attacks. To address these challenges, Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have emerged as a compelling extension of conventional neural networks, integrating uncertainty estimation into their predictive capabilities. This comprehensive primer presents a systematic introduction to the fundamental concepts of neural networks and Bayesian inference, elucidating their synergistic integration for the development of BNNs. The target audience comprises statisticians with a potential background in Bayesian methods but lacking deep learning expertise, as well as machine learners proficient in deep neural networks but with limited exposure to Bayesian statistics. We provide an overview of commonly employed priors, examining their impact on model behavior and performance. Additionally, we delve into the practical considerations associated with training and inference in BNNs. Furthermore, we explore advanced topics within the realm of BNN research, acknowledging the existence of ongoing debates and controversies. By offering insights into cutting-edge developments, this primer not only equips researchers and practitioners with a solid foundation in BNNs, but also illuminates the potential applications of this dynamic field. As a valuable resource, it fosters an understanding of BNNs and their promising prospects, facilitating further advancements in the pursuit of knowledge and innovation.

The standard paired-sample testing approach in the multidimensional setting applies multiple univariate tests on the individual features, followed by p-value adjustments. Such an approach suffers when the data carry numerous features. A number of studies have shown that classification accuracy can be seen as a proxy for two-sample testing. However, neither theoretical foundations nor practical recipes have been proposed so far on how this strategy could be extended to multidimensional paired-sample testing. In this work, we put forward the idea that scoring functions can be produced by the decision rules defined by the perpendicular bisecting hyperplanes of the line segments connecting each pair of instances. Then, the optimal scoring function can be obtained by the pseudomedian of those rules, which we estimate by extending naturally the Hodges-Lehmann estimator. We accordingly propose a framework of a two-step testing procedure. First, we estimate the bisecting hyperplanes for each pair of instances and an aggregated rule derived through the Hodges-Lehmann estimator. The paired samples are scored by this aggregated rule to produce a unidimensional representation. Second, we perform a Wilcoxon signed-rank test on the obtained representation. Our experiments indicate that our approach has substantial performance gains in testing accuracy compared to the traditional multivariate and multiple testing, while at the same time estimates each feature's contribution to the final result.

Recent advances in generative imagery have brought forth outpainting and inpainting models that can produce high-quality, plausible image content in unknown regions, but the content these models hallucinate is necessarily inauthentic, since the models lack sufficient context about the true scene. In this work, we propose RealFill, a novel generative approach for image completion that fills in missing regions of an image with the content that should have been there. RealFill is a generative inpainting model that is personalized using only a few reference images of a scene. These reference images do not have to be aligned with the target image, and can be taken with drastically varying viewpoints, lighting conditions, camera apertures, or image styles. Once personalized, RealFill is able to complete a target image with visually compelling contents that are faithful to the original scene. We evaluate RealFill on a new image completion benchmark that covers a set of diverse and challenging scenarios, and find that it outperforms existing approaches by a large margin. See more results on our project page: https://realfill.github.io

Diverse explainability methods of graph neural networks (GNN) have recently been developed to highlight the edges and nodes in the graph that contribute the most to the model predictions. However, it is not clear yet how to evaluate the correctness of those explanations, whether it is from a human or a model perspective. One unaddressed bottleneck in the current evaluation procedure is the problem of out-of-distribution explanations, whose distribution differs from those of the training data. This important issue affects existing evaluation metrics such as the popular faithfulness or fidelity score. In this paper, we show the limitations of faithfulness metrics. We propose GInX-Eval (Graph In-distribution eXplanation Evaluation), an evaluation procedure of graph explanations that overcomes the pitfalls of faithfulness and offers new insights on explainability methods. Using a retraining strategy, the GInX score measures how informative removed edges are for the model and the EdgeRank score evaluates if explanatory edges are correctly ordered by their importance. GInX-Eval verifies if ground-truth explanations are instructive to the GNN model. In addition, it shows that many popular methods, including gradient-based methods, produce explanations that are not better than a random designation of edges as important subgraphs, challenging the findings of current works in the area. Results with GInX-Eval are consistent across multiple datasets and align with human evaluation.

The COVID-19 pandemic has globally posed numerous health challenges, notably the emergence of post-COVID-19 cardiovascular complications. This study addresses this by utilizing data-driven machine learning models to predict such complications in 352 post-COVID-19 patients from Iraq. Clinical data, including demographics, comorbidities, lab results, and imaging, were collected and used to construct predictive models. These models, leveraging various machine learning algorithms, demonstrated commendable performance in identifying patients at risk. Early detection through these models promises timely interventions and improved outcomes. In conclusion, this research underscores the potential of data-driven machine learning for predicting post-COVID-19 cardiovascular complications, emphasizing the need for continued validation and research in diverse clinical settings.

In representation learning, regression has traditionally received less attention than classification. Directly applying representation learning techniques designed for classification to regression often results in fragmented representations in the latent space, yielding sub-optimal performance. In this paper, we argue that the potential of contrastive learning for regression has been overshadowed due to the neglect of two crucial aspects: ordinality-awareness and hardness. To address these challenges, we advocate "mixup your own contrastive pairs for supervised contrastive regression", instead of relying solely on real/augmented samples. Specifically, we propose Supervised Contrastive Learning for Regression with Mixup (SupReMix). It takes anchor-inclusive mixtures (mixup of the anchor and a distinct negative sample) as hard negative pairs and anchor-exclusive mixtures (mixup of two distinct negative samples) as hard positive pairs at the embedding level. This strategy formulates harder contrastive pairs by integrating richer ordinal information. Through extensive experiments on six regression datasets including 2D images, volumetric images, text, tabular data, and time-series signals, coupled with theoretical analysis, we demonstrate that SupReMix pre-training fosters continuous ordered representations of regression data, resulting in significant improvement in regression performance. Furthermore, SupReMix is superior to other approaches in a range of regression challenges including transfer learning, imbalanced training data, and scenarios with fewer training samples.

Standard practice within Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) involves optimizing against a Reward Model (RM), which itself is trained to reflect human preferences for desirable generations. A notable subject that is understudied is the (in-)consistency of RMs -- whether they can recognize the semantic changes to different prompts and appropriately adapt their reward assignments -- and their impact on the downstream RLHF model. In this paper, we visit a series of research questions relevant to RM inconsistency: (1) How can we measure the consistency of reward models? (2) How consistent are the existing RMs and how can we improve them? (3) In what ways does reward inconsistency influence the chatbots resulting from the RLHF model training? We propose Contrast Instructions -- a benchmarking strategy for the consistency of RM. Each example in Contrast Instructions features a pair of lexically similar instructions with different ground truth responses. A consistent RM is expected to rank the corresponding instruction and response higher than other combinations. We observe that current RMs trained with the standard ranking objective fail miserably on Contrast Instructions compared to average humans. To show that RM consistency can be improved efficiently without using extra training budget, we propose two techniques ConvexDA and RewardFusion, which enhance reward consistency through extrapolation during the RM training and inference stage, respectively. We show that RLHF models trained with a more consistent RM yield more useful responses, suggesting that reward inconsistency exhibits a trickle-down effect on the downstream RLHF process.

Anomaly detection is critical to ensure the security of cyber-physical systems (CPS). However, due to the increasing complexity of attacks and CPS themselves, anomaly detection in CPS is becoming more and more challenging. In our previous work, we proposed a digital twin-based anomaly detection method, called ATTAIN, which takes advantage of both historical and real-time data of CPS. However, such data vary significantly in terms of difficulty. Therefore, similar to human learning processes, deep learning models (e.g., ATTAIN) can benefit from an easy-to-difficult curriculum. To this end, in this paper, we present a novel approach, named digitaL twin-based Anomaly deTecTion wIth Curriculum lEarning (LATTICE), which extends ATTAIN by introducing curriculum learning to optimize its learning paradigm. LATTICE attributes each sample with a difficulty score, before being fed into a training scheduler. The training scheduler samples batches of training data based on these difficulty scores such that learning from easy to difficult data can be performed. To evaluate LATTICE, we use five publicly available datasets collected from five real-world CPS testbeds. We compare LATTICE with ATTAIN and two other state-of-the-art anomaly detectors. Evaluation results show that LATTICE outperforms the three baselines and ATTAIN by 0.906%-2.367% in terms of the F1 score. LATTICE also, on average, reduces the training time of ATTAIN by 4.2% on the five datasets and is on par with the baselines in terms of detection delay time.

In this study, we leveraged machine learning techniques to identify risk factors associated with post-COVID-19 mental health disorders. Our analysis, based on data collected from 669 patients across various provinces in Iraq, yielded valuable insights. We found that age, gender, and geographical region of residence were significant demographic factors influencing the likelihood of developing mental health disorders in post-COVID-19 patients. Additionally, comorbidities and the severity of COVID-19 illness were important clinical predictors. Psychosocial factors, such as social support, coping strategies, and perceived stress levels, also played a substantial role. Our findings emphasize the complex interplay of multiple factors in the development of mental health disorders following COVID-19 recovery. Healthcare providers and policymakers should consider these risk factors when designing targeted interventions and support systems for individuals at risk. Machine learning-based approaches can provide a valuable tool for predicting and preventing adverse mental health outcomes in post-COVID-19 patients. Further research and prospective studies are needed to validate these findings and enhance our understanding of the long-term psychological impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. This study contributes to the growing body of knowledge regarding the mental health consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic and underscores the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to address the diverse needs of individuals on the path to recovery. Keywords: COVID-19, mental health, risk factors, machine learning, Iraq

Decision forests are widely used for classification and regression tasks. A lesser known property of tree-based methods is that one can construct a proximity matrix from the tree(s), and these proximity matrices are induced kernels. While there has been extensive research on the applications and properties of kernels, there is relatively little research on kernels induced by decision forests. We construct Kernel Mean Embedding Random Forests (KMERF), which induce kernels from random trees and/or forests using leaf-node proximity. We introduce the notion of an asymptotically characteristic kernel, and prove that KMERF kernels are asymptotically characteristic for both discrete and continuous data. Because KMERF is data-adaptive, we suspected it would outperform kernels selected a priori on finite sample data. We illustrate that KMERF nearly dominates current state-of-the-art kernel-based tests across a diverse range of high-dimensional two-sample and independence testing settings. Furthermore, our forest-based approach is interpretable, and provides feature importance metrics that readily distinguish important dimensions, unlike other high-dimensional non-parametric testing procedures. Hence, this work demonstrates the decision forest-based kernel can be more powerful and more interpretable than existing methods, flying in the face of conventional wisdom of the trade-off between the two.

Modern DNN-based recommendation systems rely on training-derived embeddings of sparse features. Input sparsity makes obtaining high-quality embeddings for rarely-occurring categories harder as their representations are updated infrequently. We demonstrate a training-time technique to produce superior embeddings via effective cross-category learning and theoretically explain its surprising effectiveness. The scheme, termed the multi-layer embeddings training (MLET), trains embeddings using factorization of the embedding layer, with an inner dimension higher than the target embedding dimension. For inference efficiency, MLET converts the trained two-layer embedding into a single-layer one thus keeping inference-time model size unchanged. Empirical superiority of MLET is puzzling as its search space is not larger than that of the single-layer embedding. The strong dependence of MLET on the inner dimension is even more surprising. We develop a theory that explains both of these behaviors by showing that MLET creates an adaptive update mechanism modulated by the singular vectors of embeddings. When tested on multiple state-of-the-art recommendation models for click-through rate (CTR) prediction tasks, MLET consistently produces better models, especially for rare items. At constant model quality, MLET allows embedding dimension, and model size, reduction by up to 16x, and 5.8x on average, across the models.

Current reinforcement learning algorithms struggle in sparse and complex environments, most notably in long-horizon manipulation tasks entailing a plethora of different sequences. In this work, we propose the Intrinsically Guided Exploration from Large Language Models (IGE-LLMs) framework. By leveraging LLMs as an assistive intrinsic reward, IGE-LLMs guides the exploratory process in reinforcement learning to address intricate long-horizon with sparse rewards robotic manipulation tasks. We evaluate our framework and related intrinsic learning methods in an environment challenged with exploration, and a complex robotic manipulation task challenged by both exploration and long-horizons. Results show IGE-LLMs (i) exhibit notably higher performance over related intrinsic methods and the direct use of LLMs in decision-making, (ii) can be combined and complement existing learning methods highlighting its modularity, (iii) are fairly insensitive to different intrinsic scaling parameters, and (iv) maintain robustness against increased levels of uncertainty and horizons.

Models with fewer parameters are necessary for the neural control of memory-limited, performant robots. Finding these smaller neural network architectures can be time-consuming. We propose HyperPPO, an on-policy reinforcement learning algorithm that utilizes graph hypernetworks to estimate the weights of multiple neural architectures simultaneously. Our method estimates weights for networks that are much smaller than those in common-use networks yet encode highly performant policies. We obtain multiple trained policies at the same time while maintaining sample efficiency and provide the user the choice of picking a network architecture that satisfies their computational constraints. We show that our method scales well - more training resources produce faster convergence to higher-performing architectures. We demonstrate that the neural policies estimated by HyperPPO are capable of decentralized control of a Crazyflie2.1 quadrotor. Website: https://sites.google.com/usc.edu/hyperppo

Purpose: To identify ocular hypertension (OHT) subtypes with different trends of visual field (VF) progression based on unsupervised machine learning and to discover factors associated with fast VF progression. Participants: A total of 3133 eyes of 1568 ocular hypertension treatment study (OHTS) participants with at least five follow-up VF tests were included in the study. Methods: We used a latent class mixed model (LCMM) to identify OHT subtypes using standard automated perimetry (SAP) mean deviation (MD) trajectories. We characterized the subtypes based on demographic, clinical, ocular, and VF factors at the baseline. We then identified factors driving fast VF progression using generalized estimating equation (GEE) and justified findings qualitatively and quantitatively. Results: The LCMM model discovered four clusters (subtypes) of eyes with different trajectories of MD worsening. The number of eyes in clusters were 794 (25%), 1675 (54%), 531 (17%) and 133 (4%). We labelled the clusters as Improvers, Stables, Slow progressors, and Fast progressors based on their mean of MD decline, which were 0.08, -0.06, -0.21, and -0.45 dB/year, respectively. Eyes with fast VF progression had higher baseline age, intraocular pressure (IOP), pattern standard deviation (PSD) and refractive error (RE), but lower central corneal thickness (CCT). Fast progression was associated with calcium channel blockers, being male, heart disease history, diabetes history, African American race, stroke history, and migraine headaches.

This work proposes to measure the scope of a patent claim as the reciprocal of the self-information contained in this claim. A probability of occurrence of the claim is obtained from a language model and this probability is used to compute the self-information. Grounded in information theory, this approach is based on the assumption that an unlikely concept is more informative than a usual concept, insofar as it is more surprising. In turn, the more surprising the information required to defined the claim, the narrower its scope. Five language models are considered, ranging from simplest models (each word or character is assigned an identical probability) to intermediate models (using average word or character frequencies), to a large language model (GPT2). Interestingly, the scope resulting from the simplest language models is proportional to the reciprocal of the number of words or characters involved in the claim, a metric already used in previous works. Application is made to multiple series of patent claims directed to distinct inventions, where each series consists of claims devised to have a gradually decreasing scope. The performance of the language models is assessed with respect to several ad hoc tests. The more sophisticated the model, the better the results. I.e., the GPT2 probability model outperforms models based on word and character frequencies, which themselves outdo the simplest models based on word or character counts. Still, the character count appears to be a more reliable indicator than the word count.

With the ever-growing popularity of Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), efficient GNN inference is gaining tremendous attention. Field-Programming Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are a promising execution platform due to their fine-grained parallelism, low-power consumption, reconfigurability, and concurrent execution. Even better, High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools bridge the gap between the non-trivial FPGA development efforts and rapid emergence of new GNN models. In this paper, we propose GNNHLS, an open-source framework to comprehensively evaluate GNN inference acceleration on FPGAs via HLS, containing a software stack for data generation and baseline deployment, and FPGA implementations of 6 well-tuned GNN HLS kernels. We evaluate GNNHLS on 4 graph datasets with distinct topologies and scales. The results show that GNNHLS achieves up to 50.8x speedup and 423x energy reduction relative to the CPU baselines. Compared with the GPU baselines, GNNHLS achieves up to 5.16x speedup and 74.5x energy reduction.

Abdominal multi-organ segmentation in computed tomography (CT) is crucial for many clinical applications including disease detection and treatment planning. Deep learning methods have shown unprecedented performance in this perspective. However, it is still quite challenging to accurately segment different organs utilizing a single network due to the vague boundaries of organs, the complex background, and the substantially different organ size scales. In this work we used make transformer-based model for training. It was found through previous years' competitions that basically all of the top 5 methods used CNN-based methods, which is likely due to the lack of data volume that prevents transformer-based methods from taking full advantage. The thousands of samples in this competition may enable the transformer-based model to have more excellent results. The results on the public validation set also show that the transformer-based model can achieve an acceptable result and inference time.

We propose a memory-efficient finetuning algorithm for large language models (LLMs) that supports finetuning LLMs with 65B parameters in 3-bit or 4-bit precision on as little as one 48GB GPU. Our method, modular low-rank adaptation (ModuLoRA), integrates any user-specified weight quantizer with finetuning via low-rank adapters (LoRAs). Our approach relies on a simple quantization-agnostic backward pass that adaptively materializes low-precision LLM weights from a custom black-box quantization module. This approach enables finetuning 3-bit LLMs for the first time--leveraging state-of-the-art 3-bit OPTQ quantization often outperforms finetuning that relies on less sophisticated 4-bit and 8-bit methods. In our experiments, ModuLoRA attains competitive performance on text classification, natural language infernece, and instruction following tasks using significantly less memory than existing approaches, and we also surpass the state-of-the-art ROUGE score on a popular summarization task. We release ModuLoRA together with a series of low-precision models--including the first family of 3-bit instruction following Alpaca LLMs--as part of LLMTOOLS, a user-friendly library for quantizing, running, and finetuning LLMs on consumer GPUs.

Integrating native AI support into the network architecture is an essential objective of 6G. Federated Learning (FL) emerges as a potential paradigm, facilitating decentralized AI model training across a diverse range of devices under the coordination of a central server. However, several challenges hinder its wide application in the 6G context, such as malicious attacks and privacy snooping on local model updates, and centralization pitfalls. This work proposes a trusted architecture for supporting FL, which utilizes Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and Graph Neural Network (GNN), including three key features. First, a pre-processing layer employing homomorphic encryption is incorporated to securely aggregate local models, preserving the privacy of individual models. Second, given the distributed nature and graph structure between clients and nodes in the pre-processing layer, GNN is leveraged to identify abnormal local models, enhancing system security. Third, DLT is utilized to decentralize the system by selecting one of the candidates to perform the central server's functions. Additionally, DLT ensures reliable data management by recording data exchanges in an immutable and transparent ledger. The feasibility of the novel architecture is validated through simulations, demonstrating improved performance in anomalous model detection and global model accuracy compared to relevant baselines.

We provide results that exactly quantify how data augmentation affects the variance and limiting distribution of estimates, and analyze several specific models in detail. The results confirm some observations made in machine learning practice, but also lead to unexpected findings: Data augmentation may increase rather than decrease the uncertainty of estimates, such as the empirical prediction risk. It can act as a regularizer, but fails to do so in certain high-dimensional problems, and it may shift the double-descent peak of an empirical risk. Overall, the analysis shows that several properties data augmentation has been attributed with are not either true or false, but rather depend on a combination of factors -- notably the data distribution, the properties of the estimator, and the interplay of sample size, number of augmentations, and dimension. Our main theoretical tool is a limit theorem for functions of randomly transformed, high-dimensional random vectors. The proof draws on work in probability on noise stability of functions of many variables.

Advancements in nanotechnology and material science are paving the way toward nanoscale devices that combine sensing, computing, data and energy storage, and wireless communication. In precision medicine, these nanodevices show promise for disease diagnostics, treatment, and monitoring from within the patients' bloodstreams. Assigning the location of a sensed biological event with the event itself, which is the main proposition of flow-guided in-body nanoscale localization, would be immensely beneficial from the perspective of precision medicine. The nanoscale nature of the nanodevices and the challenging environment that the bloodstream represents, result in current flow-guided localization approaches being constrained in their communication and energy-related capabilities. The communication and energy constraints of the nanodevices result in different features of raw data for flow-guided localization, in turn affecting its performance. An analytical modeling of the effects of imperfect communication and constrained energy causing intermittent operation of the nanodevices on the raw data produced by the nanodevices would be beneficial. Hence, we propose an analytical model of raw data for flow-guided localization, where the raw data is modeled as a function of communication and energy-related capabilities of the nanodevice. We evaluate the model by comparing its output with the one obtained through the utilization of a simulator for objective evaluation of flow-guided localization, featuring comparably higher level of realism. Our results across a number of scenarios and heterogeneous performance metrics indicate high similarity between the model and simulator-generated raw datasets.

We present RLLTE: a long-term evolution, extremely modular, and open-source framework for reinforcement learning (RL) research and application. Beyond delivering top-notch algorithm implementations, RLLTE also serves as a toolkit for developing algorithms. More specifically, RLLTE decouples the RL algorithms completely from the exploitation-exploration perspective, providing a large number of components to accelerate algorithm development and evolution. In particular, RLLTE is the first RL framework to build a complete and luxuriant ecosystem, which includes model training, evaluation, deployment, benchmark hub, and large language model (LLM)-empowered copilot. RLLTE is expected to set standards for RL engineering practice and be highly stimulative for industry and academia.

Many real-world processes have complex tail dependence structures that cannot be characterized using classical Gaussian processes. More flexible spatial extremes models exhibit appealing extremal dependence properties but are often exceedingly prohibitive to fit and simulate from in high dimensions. In this paper, we develop a new spatial extremes model that has flexible and non-stationary dependence properties, and we integrate it in the encoding-decoding structure of a variational autoencoder (XVAE), whose parameters are estimated via variational Bayes combined with deep learning. The XVAE can be used as a spatio-temporal emulator that characterizes the distribution of potential mechanistic model output states and produces outputs that have the same statistical properties as the inputs, especially in the tail. As an aside, our approach also provides a novel way of making fast inference with complex extreme-value processes. Through extensive simulation studies, we show that our XVAE is substantially more time-efficient than traditional Bayesian inference while also outperforming many spatial extremes models with a stationary dependence structure. To further demonstrate the computational power of the XVAE, we analyze a high-resolution satellite-derived dataset of sea surface temperature in the Red Sea, which includes 30 years of daily measurements at 16703 grid cells. We find that the extremal dependence strength is weaker in the interior of Red Sea and it has decreased slightly over time.

The well-known governing physics in science and engineering is often based on certain assumptions and approximations. Therefore, analyses and designs carried out based on these equations are also approximate. The emergence of data-driven models has, to a certain degree, addressed this challenge; however, the purely data-driven models often (a) lack interpretability, (b) are data-hungry, and (c) do not generalize beyond the training window. Operator learning has recently been proposed as a potential alternative to address the aforementioned challenges; however, the challenges are still persistent. We here argue that one of the possible solutions resides in data-physics fusion, where the data-driven model is used to correct/identify the missing physics. To that end, we propose a novel Differentiable Physics Augmented Wavelet Neural Operator (DPA-WNO). The proposed DPA-WNO blends a differentiable physics solver with the Wavelet Neural Operator (WNO), where the role of WNO is to model the missing physics. This empowers the proposed framework to exploit the capability of WNO to learn from data while retaining the interpretability and generalizability associated with physics-based solvers. We illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach in solving time-dependent uncertainty quantification problems due to randomness in the initial condition. Four benchmark uncertainty quantification and reliability analysis examples from various fields of science and engineering are solved using the proposed approach. The results presented illustrate interesting features of the proposed approach.

We study the excess minimum risk in statistical inference, defined as the difference between the minimum expected loss in estimating a random variable from an observed feature vector and the minimum expected loss in estimating the same random variable from a transformation (statistic) of the feature vector. After characterizing lossless transformations, i.e., transformations for which the excess risk is zero for all loss functions, we construct a partitioning test statistic for the hypothesis that a given transformation is lossless and show that for i.i.d. data the test is strongly consistent. More generally, we develop information-theoretic upper bounds on the excess risk that uniformly hold over fairly general classes of loss functions. Based on these bounds, we introduce the notion of a delta-lossless transformation and give sufficient conditions for a given transformation to be universally delta-lossless. Applications to classification, nonparametric regression, portfolio strategies, information bottleneck, and deep learning, are also surveyed.

Molecular Representation Learning (MRL) has emerged as a powerful tool for drug and materials discovery in a variety of tasks such as virtual screening and inverse design. While there has been a surge of interest in advancing model-centric techniques, the influence of both data quantity and quality on molecular representations is not yet clearly understood within this field. In this paper, we delve into the neural scaling behaviors of MRL from a data-centric viewpoint, examining four key dimensions: (1) data modalities, (2) dataset splitting, (3) the role of pre-training, and (4) model capacity. Our empirical studies confirm a consistent power-law relationship between data volume and MRL performance across these dimensions. Additionally, through detailed analysis, we identify potential avenues for improving learning efficiency. To challenge these scaling laws, we adapt seven popular data pruning strategies to molecular data and benchmark their performance. Our findings underline the importance of data-centric MRL and highlight possible directions for future research.

In many areas of decision-making, forecasting is an essential pillar. Consequently, many different forecasting methods have been proposed. From our experience, recently presented forecasting methods are computationally intensive, poorly automated, tailored to a particular data set, or they lack a predictable time-to-result. To this end, we introduce Telescope, a novel machine learning-based forecasting approach that automatically retrieves relevant information from a given time series and splits it into parts, handling each of them separately. In contrast to deep learning methods, our approach doesn't require parameterization or the need to train and fit a multitude of parameters. It operates with just one time series and provides forecasts within seconds without any additional setup. Our experiments show that Telescope outperforms recent methods by providing accurate and reliable forecasts while making no assumptions about the analyzed time series.

With the rapid development of the Intelligent Transportation System (ITS), accurate traffic forecasting has emerged as a critical challenge. The key bottleneck lies in capturing the intricate spatio-temporal traffic patterns. In recent years, numerous neural networks with complicated architectures have been proposed to address this issue. However, the advancements in network architectures have encountered diminishing performance gains. In this study, we present a novel component called spatio-temporal adaptive embedding that can yield outstanding results with vanilla transformers. Our proposed Spatio-Temporal Adaptive Embedding transformer (STAEformer) achieves state-of-the-art performance on five real-world traffic forecasting datasets. Further experiments demonstrate that spatio-temporal adaptive embedding plays a crucial role in traffic forecasting by effectively capturing intrinsic spatio-temporal relations and chronological information in traffic time series.

Provenance graphs are structured audit logs that describe the history of a system's execution. Recent studies have explored a variety of techniques to analyze provenance graphs for automated host intrusion detection, focusing particularly on advanced persistent threats. Sifting through their design documents, we identify four common dimensions that drive the development of provenance-based intrusion detection systems (PIDSes): scope (can PIDSes detect modern attacks that infiltrate across application boundaries?), attack agnosticity (can PIDSes detect novel attacks without a priori knowledge of attack characteristics?), timeliness (can PIDSes efficiently monitor host systems as they run?), and attack reconstruction (can PIDSes distill attack activity from large provenance graphs so that sysadmins can easily understand and quickly respond to system intrusion?). We present KAIROS, the first PIDS that simultaneously satisfies the desiderata in all four dimensions, whereas existing approaches sacrifice at least one and struggle to achieve comparable detection performance. Kairos leverages a novel graph neural network-based encoder-decoder architecture that learns the temporal evolution of a provenance graph's structural changes to quantify the degree of anomalousness for each system event. Then, based on this fine-grained information, Kairos reconstructs attack footprints, generating compact summary graphs that accurately describe malicious activity over a stream of system audit logs. Using state-of-the-art benchmark datasets, we demonstrate that Kairos outperforms previous approaches.

Fair machine learning research has been primarily concerned with classification tasks that result in discrimination. However, as machine learning algorithms are applied in new contexts the harms and injustices that result are qualitatively different than those presently studied. The existing research paradigm in machine learning which develops metrics and definitions of fairness cannot account for these qualitatively different types of injustice. One example of this is the problem of algorithmic collusion and market fairness. The negative consequences of algorithmic collusion affect all consumers, not only particular members of a protected class. Drawing on this case study, I propose an ethical framework for researchers and practitioners in machine learning seeking to develop and apply fairness metrics that extends to new domains. This contribution ties the development of formal metrics of fairness to specifically scoped normative principles. This enables fairness metrics to reflect different concerns from discrimination. I conclude with the limitations of my proposal and discuss promising avenues for future research.

In root finding and optimization, there are many cases where there is a closed set $A$ one likes that the sequence constructed by one's favourite method will not converge to A (here, we do not assume extra properties on $A$ such as being convex or connected). For example, if one wants to find roots, and one chooses initial points in the basin of attraction for 1 root $x^*$ (a fact which one may not know before hand), then one will always end up in that root. In this case, one would like to have a mechanism to avoid this point $z^*$ in the next runs of one's algorithm. In this paper, we propose two new methods aiming to achieve this. In the first method, we divide the cost function by an appropriate power of the distance function to $A$. This idea is inspired by how one would try to find all roots of a function in 1 variable. In the second method, which is more suitable for constrained optimization, we redefine the value of the function to be a big constant on $A$. We also propose, based on this, an algorithm to escape the basin of attraction of a component of positive dimension to reach another component. As an application, we prove a rigorous guarantee for finding roots of a meromorphic function of 1 complex variable in a given domain. Along the way, we compare with main existing relevant methods in the current literature. We provide several examples in various different settings to illustrate the usefulness of the new approach.

The current learning process of deep learning, regardless of any deep neural network (DNN) architecture and/or learning algorithm used, is essentially a single resolution training. We explore multiresolution learning and show that multiresolution learning can significantly improve robustness of DNN models for both 1D signal and 2D signal (image) prediction problems. We demonstrate this improvement in terms of both noise and adversarial robustness as well as with small training dataset size. Our results also suggest that it may not be necessary to trade standard accuracy for robustness with multiresolution learning, which is, interestingly, contrary to the observation obtained from the traditional single resolution learning setting.

Manipulating objects without grasping them is an essential component of human dexterity, referred to as non-prehensile manipulation. Non-prehensile manipulation may enable more complex interactions with the objects, but also presents challenges in reasoning about gripper-object interactions. In this work, we introduce Hybrid Actor-Critic Maps for Manipulation (HACMan), a reinforcement learning approach for 6D non-prehensile manipulation of objects using point cloud observations. HACMan proposes a temporally-abstracted and spatially-grounded object-centric action representation that consists of selecting a contact location from the object point cloud and a set of motion parameters describing how the robot will move after making contact. We modify an existing off-policy RL algorithm to learn in this hybrid discrete-continuous action representation. We evaluate HACMan on a 6D object pose alignment task in both simulation and in the real world. On the hardest version of our task, with randomized initial poses, randomized 6D goals, and diverse object categories, our policy demonstrates strong generalization to unseen object categories without a performance drop, achieving an 89% success rate on unseen objects in simulation and 50% success rate with zero-shot transfer in the real world. Compared to alternative action representations, HACMan achieves a success rate more than three times higher than the best baseline. With zero-shot sim2real transfer, our policy can successfully manipulate unseen objects in the real world for challenging non-planar goals, using dynamic and contact-rich non-prehensile skills. Videos can be found on the project website: https://hacman-2023.github.io.

Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) is a generic technique to model various NP-hard combinatorial optimization problems in the form of binary variables. The Hamiltonian function is often used to formulate QUBO problems where it is used as the objective function in the context of optimization. Recently, PI-GNN, a generic scalable framework, has been proposed to address the Combinatorial Optimization (CO) problems over graphs based on a simple Graph Neural Network (GNN) architecture. Their novel contribution was a generic QUBO-formulated Hamiltonian-inspired loss function that was optimized using GNN. In this study, we address a crucial issue related to the aforementioned setup especially observed in denser graphs. The reinforcement learning-based paradigm has also been widely used to address numerous CO problems. Here we also formulate and empirically evaluate the compatibility of the QUBO-formulated Hamiltonian as the generic reward function in the Reinforcement Learning paradigm to directly integrate the actual node projection status during training as the form of rewards. In our experiments, we observed up to 44% improvement in the RL-based setup compared to the PI-GNN algorithm. Our implementation can be found in https://github.com/rizveeredwan/learning-graph-structure.

We present the Temporal Graph Benchmark (TGB), a collection of challenging and diverse benchmark datasets for realistic, reproducible, and robust evaluation of machine learning models on temporal graphs. TGB datasets are of large scale, spanning years in duration, incorporate both node and edge-level prediction tasks and cover a diverse set of domains including social, trade, transaction, and transportation networks. For both tasks, we design evaluation protocols based on realistic use-cases. We extensively benchmark each dataset and find that the performance of common models can vary drastically across datasets. In addition, on dynamic node property prediction tasks, we show that simple methods often achieve superior performance compared to existing temporal graph models. We believe that these findings open up opportunities for future research on temporal graphs. Finally, TGB provides an automated machine learning pipeline for reproducible and accessible temporal graph research, including data loading, experiment setup and performance evaluation. TGB will be maintained and updated on a regular basis and welcomes community feedback. TGB datasets, data loaders, example codes, evaluation setup, and leaderboards are publicly available at https://tgb.complexdatalab.com/.

In response to recent data regulation requirements, machine unlearning (MU) has emerged as a critical process to remove the influence of specific examples from a given model. Although exact unlearning can be achieved through complete model retraining using the remaining dataset, the associated computational costs have driven the development of efficient, approximate unlearning techniques. Moving beyond data-centric MU approaches, our study introduces a novel model-based perspective: model sparsification via weight pruning, which is capable of reducing the gap between exact unlearning and approximate unlearning. We show in both theory and practice that model sparsity can boost the multi-criteria unlearning performance of an approximate unlearner, closing the approximation gap, while continuing to be efficient. This leads to a new MU paradigm, termed prune first, then unlearn, which infuses a sparse model prior into the unlearning process. Building on this insight, we also develop a sparsity-aware unlearning method that utilizes sparsity regularization to enhance the training process of approximate unlearning. Extensive experiments show that our proposals consistently benefit MU in various unlearning scenarios. A notable highlight is the 77% unlearning efficacy gain of fine-tuning (one of the simplest unlearning methods) when using sparsity-aware unlearning. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical impact of our proposed MU methods in addressing other machine learning challenges, such as defending against backdoor attacks and enhancing transfer learning. Codes are available at https://github.com/OPTML-Group/Unlearn-Sparse.

We provide a simple convergence proof for AdaGrad optimizing non-convex objectives under only affine noise variance and bounded smoothness assumptions. The proof is essentially based on a novel auxiliary function $\xi$ that helps eliminate the complexity of handling the correlation between the numerator and denominator of AdaGrad's update. Leveraging simple proofs, we are able to obtain tighter results than existing results \citep{faw2022power} and extend the analysis to several new and important cases. Specifically, for the over-parameterized regime, we show that AdaGrad needs only $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\varepsilon^2})$ iterations to ensure the gradient norm smaller than $\varepsilon$, which matches the rate of SGD and significantly tighter than existing rates $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{\varepsilon^4})$ for AdaGrad. We then discard the bounded smoothness assumption and consider a realistic assumption on smoothness called $(L_0,L_1)$-smooth condition, which allows local smoothness to grow with the gradient norm. Again based on the auxiliary function $\xi$, we prove that AdaGrad succeeds in converging under $(L_0,L_1)$-smooth condition as long as the learning rate is lower than a threshold. Interestingly, we further show that the requirement on learning rate under the $(L_0,L_1)$-smooth condition is necessary via proof by contradiction, in contrast with the case of uniform smoothness conditions where convergence is guaranteed regardless of learning rate choices. Together, our analyses broaden the understanding of AdaGrad and demonstrate the power of the new auxiliary function in the investigations of AdaGrad.

We introduce Transformer-VQ, a decoder-only transformer computing softmax-based dense self-attention in linear time. Transformer-VQ's efficient attention is enabled by vector-quantized keys and a novel caching mechanism. In large-scale experiments, Transformer-VQ is shown highly competitive in quality, with strong results on Enwik8 (0.99 bpb), PG-19 (26.6 ppl), and ImageNet64 (3.16 bpb). Code: https://github.com/transformer-vq/transformer_vq

We study differentially private (DP) stochastic optimization (SO) with loss functions whose worst-case Lipschitz parameter over all data points may be extremely large. To date, the vast majority of work on DP SO assumes that the loss is uniformly Lipschitz continuous over data (i.e. stochastic gradients are uniformly bounded over all data points). While this assumption is convenient, it often leads to pessimistic excess risk bounds. In many practical problems, the worst-case (uniform) Lipschitz parameter of the loss over all data points may be extremely large due to outliers. In such cases, the error bounds for DP SO, which scale with the worst-case Lipschitz parameter of the loss, are vacuous. To address these limitations, this work provides near-optimal excess risk bounds that do not depend on the uniform Lipschitz parameter of the loss. Building on a recent line of work (Wang et al., 2020; Kamath et al., 2022), we assume that stochastic gradients have bounded $k$-th order moments for some $k \geq 2$. Compared with works on uniformly Lipschitz DP SO, our excess risk scales with the $k$-th moment bound instead of the uniform Lipschitz parameter of the loss, allowing for significantly faster rates in the presence of outliers and/or heavy-tailed data. For convex and strongly convex loss functions, we provide the first asymptotically optimal excess risk bounds (up to a logarithmic factor). In contrast to (Wang et al., 2020; Kamath et al., 2022), our bounds do not require the loss function to be differentiable/smooth. We also devise a linear-time algorithm for smooth losses that has excess risk that is tight in certain practical parameter regimes. Additionally, our work is the first to address non-convex non-uniformly Lipschitz loss functions satisfying the Proximal-PL inequality; this covers some practical machine learning models. Our Proximal-PL algorithm has near-optimal excess risk.

In many real-world tasks, the concerned objects can be represented as a multi-instance bag associated with a candidate label set, which consists of one ground-truth label and several false positive labels. Multi-instance partial-label learning (MIPL) is a learning paradigm to deal with such tasks and has achieved favorable performances. Existing MIPL approach follows the instance-space paradigm by assigning augmented candidate label sets of bags to each instance and aggregating bag-level labels from instance-level labels. However, this scheme may be suboptimal as global bag-level information is ignored and the predicted labels of bags are sensitive to predictions of negative instances. In this paper, we study an alternative scheme where a multi-instance bag is embedded into a single vector representation. Accordingly, an intuitive algorithm named DEMIPL, i.e., Disambiguated attention Embedding for Multi-Instance Partial-Label learning, is proposed. DEMIPL employs a disambiguation attention mechanism to aggregate a multi-instance bag into a single vector representation, followed by a momentum-based disambiguation strategy to identify the ground-truth label from the candidate label set. Furthermore, we introduce a real-world MIPL dataset for colorectal cancer classification. Experimental results on benchmark and real-world datasets validate the superiority of DEMIPL against the compared MIPL and partial-label learning approaches.

When deploying modern machine learning-enabled robotic systems in high-stakes applications, detecting distribution shift is critical. However, most existing methods for detecting distribution shift are not well-suited to robotics settings, where data often arrives in a streaming fashion and may be very high-dimensional. In this work, we present an online method for detecting distribution shift with guarantees on the false positive rate - i.e., when there is no distribution shift, our system is very unlikely (with probability $< \epsilon$) to falsely issue an alert; any alerts that are issued should therefore be heeded. Our method is specifically designed for efficient detection even with high dimensional data, and it empirically achieves up to 11x faster detection on realistic robotics settings compared to prior work while maintaining a low false negative rate in practice (whenever there is a distribution shift in our experiments, our method indeed emits an alert). We demonstrate our approach in both simulation and hardware for a visual servoing task, and show that our method indeed issues an alert before a failure occurs.

Variance in predictions across different trained models is a significant, under-explored source of error in fair classification. In practice, the variance on some data examples is so large that decisions can be effectively arbitrary. To investigate this problem, we take an experimental approach and make four overarching contributions: We 1) Define a metric called self-consistency, derived from variance, which we use as a proxy for measuring and reducing arbitrariness; 2) Develop an ensembling algorithm that abstains from classification when a prediction would be arbitrary; 3) Conduct the largest to-date empirical study of the role of variance (vis-a-vis self-consistency and arbitrariness) in fair classification; and, 4) Release a toolkit that makes the US Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) datasets easily usable for future research. Altogether, our experiments reveal shocking insights about the reliability of conclusions on benchmark datasets. Most fairness classification benchmarks are close-to-fair when taking into account the amount of arbitrariness present in predictions -- before we even try to apply common fairness interventions. This finding calls into question the practical utility of common algorithmic fairness methods, and in turn suggests that we should fundamentally reconsider how we choose to measure fairness in machine learning.

The logical analysis of data, LAD, is a technique that yields two-class classifiers based on Boolean functions having disjunctive normal form (DNF) representation. Although LAD algorithms employ optimization techniques, the resulting binary classifiers or binary rules do not lead to overfitting. We propose a theoretical justification for the absence of overfitting by estimating the Vapnik-Chervonenkis dimension (VC dimension) for LAD models where hypothesis sets consist of DNFs with a small number of cubic monomials. We illustrate and confirm our observations empirically.

Learning exchange correlation functionals, used in quantum chemistry calculations, from data has become increasingly important in recent years, but training such a functional requires sophisticated software infrastructure. For this reason, we build open source infrastructure to train neural exchange correlation functionals. We aim to standardize the processing pipeline by adapting state-of-the-art techniques from work done by multiple groups. We have open sourced the model in the DeepChem library to provide a platform for additional research on differentiable quantum chemistry methods.

The soft Dice loss (SDL) has taken a pivotal role in numerous automated segmentation pipelines in the medical imaging community. Over the last years, some reasons behind its superior functioning have been uncovered and further optimizations have been explored. However, there is currently no implementation that supports its direct utilization in scenarios involving soft labels. Hence, a synergy between the use of SDL and research leveraging the use of soft labels, also in the context of model calibration, is still missing. In this work, we introduce Dice semimetric losses (DMLs), which (i) are by design identical to SDL in a standard setting with hard labels, but (ii) can be employed in settings with soft labels. Our experiments on the public QUBIQ, LiTS and KiTS benchmarks confirm the potential synergy of DMLs with soft labels (e.g.\ averaging, label smoothing, and knowledge distillation) over hard labels (e.g.\ majority voting and random selection). As a result, we obtain superior Dice scores and model calibration, which supports the wider adoption of DMLs in practice. The code is available at \href{https://github.com/zifuwanggg/JDTLosses}{https://github.com/zifuwanggg/JDTLosses}.

Spontaneous self-organization is ubiquitous in systems far from thermodynamic equilibrium. While organized structures that emerge dominate transport properties, universal representations that identify and describe these key objects remain elusive. Here, we introduce a theoretically-grounded framework for describing emergent organization that, via data-driven algorithms, is constructive in practice. Its building blocks are spacetime lightcones that embody how information propagates across a system through local interactions. We show that predictive equivalence classes of lightcones -- local causal states -- capture organized behaviors and coherent structures in complex spatiotemporal systems. Employing an unsupervised physics-informed machine learning algorithm and a high-performance computing implementation, we demonstrate automatically discovering coherent structures in two real world domain science problems. We show that local causal states identify vortices and track their power-law decay behavior in two-dimensional fluid turbulence. We then show how to detect and track familiar extreme weather events -- hurricanes and atmospheric rivers -- and discover other novel coherent structures associated with precipitation extremes in high-resolution climate data at the grid-cell level.

We propose a novel framework that combines deep generative time series models with decision theory for generating personalized treatment strategies. It leverages historical patient trajectory data to jointly learn the generation of realistic personalized treatment and future outcome trajectories through deep generative time series models. In particular, our framework enables the generation of novel multivariate treatment strategies tailored to the personalized patient history and trained for optimal expected future outcomes based on conditional expected utility maximization. We demonstrate our framework by generating personalized insulin treatment strategies and blood glucose predictions for hospitalized diabetes patients, showcasing the potential of our approach for generating improved personalized treatment strategies. Keywords: deep generative model, probabilistic decision support, personalized treatment generation, insulin and blood glucose prediction

Hyperbolic spaces have been quite popular in the recent past for representing hierarchically organized data. Further, several classification algorithms for data in these spaces have been proposed in the literature. These algorithms mainly use either hyperplanes or geodesics for decision boundaries in a large margin classifiers setting leading to a non-convex optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a novel large margin classifier based on horospherical decision boundaries that leads to a geodesically convex optimization problem that can be optimized using any Riemannian gradient descent technique guaranteeing a globally optimal solution. We present several experiments depicting the competitive performance of our classifier in comparison to SOTA.

The generation of adversarial inputs has become a crucial issue in establishing the robustness and trustworthiness of deep neural nets, especially when they are used in safety-critical application domains such as autonomous vehicles and precision medicine. However, the problem poses multiple practical challenges, including scalability issues owing to large-sized networks, and the generation of adversarial inputs that lack important qualities such as naturalness and output-impartiality. This problem shares its end goal with the task of patching neural nets where small changes in some of the network's weights need to be discovered so that upon applying these changes, the modified net produces the desirable output for a given set of inputs. We exploit this connection by proposing to obtain an adversarial input from a patch, with the underlying observation that the effect of changing the weights can also be brought about by changing the inputs instead. Thus, this paper presents a novel way to generate input perturbations that are adversarial for a given network by using an efficient network patching technique. We note that the proposed method is significantly more effective than the prior state-of-the-art techniques.

Orbital-free density functional theory (OFDFT) is a quantum chemistry formulation that has a lower cost scaling than the prevailing Kohn-Sham DFT, which is increasingly desired for contemporary molecular research. However, its accuracy is limited by the kinetic energy density functional, which is notoriously hard to approximate for non-periodic molecular systems. In this work, we propose M-OFDFT, an OFDFT approach capable of solving molecular systems using a deep-learning functional model. We build the essential nonlocality into the model, which is made affordable by the concise density representation as expansion coefficients under an atomic basis. With techniques to address unconventional learning challenges therein, M-OFDFT achieves a comparable accuracy with Kohn-Sham DFT on a wide range of molecules untouched by OFDFT before. More attractively, M-OFDFT extrapolates well to molecules much larger than those in training, which unleashes the appealing scaling for studying large molecules including proteins, representing an advancement of the accuracy-efficiency trade-off frontier in quantum chemistry.

Scene representation has been a crucial design choice in robotic manipulation systems. An ideal representation should be 3D, dynamic, and semantic to meet the demands of diverse manipulation tasks. However, previous works often lack all three properties simultaneously. In this work, we introduce D$^3$Fields - dynamic 3D descriptor fields. These fields capture the dynamics of the underlying 3D environment and encode both semantic features and instance masks. Specifically, we project arbitrary 3D points in the workspace onto multi-view 2D visual observations and interpolate features derived from foundational models. The resulting fused descriptor fields allow for flexible goal specifications using 2D images with varied contexts, styles, and instances. To evaluate the effectiveness of these descriptor fields, we apply our representation to a wide range of robotic manipulation tasks in a zero-shot manner. Through extensive evaluation in both real-world scenarios and simulations, we demonstrate that D$^3$Fields are both generalizable and effective for zero-shot robotic manipulation tasks. In quantitative comparisons with state-of-the-art dense descriptors, such as Dense Object Nets and DINO, D$^3$Fields exhibit significantly better generalization abilities and manipulation accuracy.

Existing approaches defend against backdoor attacks in federated learning (FL) mainly through a) mitigating the impact of infected models, or b) excluding infected models. The former negatively impacts model accuracy, while the latter usually relies on globally clear boundaries between benign and infected model updates. However, model updates are easy to be mixed and scattered throughout in reality due to the diverse distributions of local data. This work focuses on excluding infected models in FL. Unlike previous perspectives from a global view, we propose Snowball, a novel anti-backdoor FL framework through bidirectional elections from an individual perspective inspired by one principle deduced by us and two principles in FL and deep learning. It is characterized by a) bottom-up election, where each candidate model update votes to several peer ones such that a few model updates are elected as selectees for aggregation; and b) top-down election, where selectees progressively enlarge themselves through picking up from the candidates. We compare Snowball with state-of-the-art defenses to backdoor attacks in FL on five real-world datasets, demonstrating its superior resistance to backdoor attacks and slight impact on the accuracy of the global model.

Parallelization techniques have become ubiquitous for accelerating inference and training of deep neural networks. Despite this, several operations are still performed in a sequential manner. For instance, the forward and backward passes are executed layer-by-layer, and the output of diffusion models is produced by applying a sequence of denoising steps. This sequential approach results in a computational cost proportional to the number of steps involved, presenting a potential bottleneck as the number of steps increases. In this work, we introduce DeepPCR, a novel algorithm which parallelizes typically sequential operations used in inference and training of neural networks. DeepPCR is based on interpreting a sequence of $L$ steps as the solution of a specific system of equations, which we recover using the Parallel Cyclic Reduction algorithm. This reduces the complexity of computing the sequential operations from $\mathcal{O}(L)$ to $\mathcal{O}(\log_2L)$, thus yielding a speedup for large $L$. To verify the theoretical lower complexity of the algorithm, and to identify regimes for speedup, we test the effectiveness of DeepPCR in parallelizing the forward and backward pass in multi-layer perceptrons, and reach speedups of up to $30\times$ for forward and $200\times$ for backward pass. We additionally showcase the flexibility of DeepPCR by parallelizing training of ResNets with as many as 1024 layers, and generation in diffusion models, enabling up to $7\times$ faster training and $11\times$ faster generation, respectively, when compared to the sequential approach.

We investigate the regret-minimisation problem in a multi-armed bandit setting with arbitrary corruptions. Similar to the classical setup, the agent receives rewards generated independently from the distribution of the arm chosen at each time. However, these rewards are not directly observed. Instead, with a fixed $\varepsilon\in (0,\frac{1}{2})$, the agent observes a sample from the chosen arm's distribution with probability $1-\varepsilon$, or from an arbitrary corruption distribution with probability $\varepsilon$. Importantly, we impose no assumptions on these corruption distributions, which can be unbounded. In this setting, accommodating potentially unbounded corruptions, we establish a problem-dependent lower bound on regret for a given family of arm distributions. We introduce CRIMED, an asymptotically-optimal algorithm that achieves the exact lower bound on regret for bandits with Gaussian distributions with known variance. Additionally, we provide a finite-sample analysis of CRIMED's regret performance. Notably, CRIMED can effectively handle corruptions with $\varepsilon$ values as high as $\frac{1}{2}$. Furthermore, we develop a tight concentration result for medians in the presence of arbitrary corruptions, even with $\varepsilon$ values up to $\frac{1}{2}$, which may be of independent interest. We also discuss an extension of the algorithm for handling misspecification in Gaussian model.

Continual Learning methods are designed to learn new tasks without erasing previous knowledge. However, Continual Learning often requires massive computational power and storage capacity for satisfactory performance. In this paper, we propose a resource-efficient continual learning method called the Elastic Expansion Network (E2Net). Leveraging core subnet distillation and precise replay sample selection, E2Net achieves superior average accuracy and diminished forgetting within the same computational and storage constraints, all while minimizing processing time. In E2Net, we propose Representative Network Distillation to identify the representative core subnet by assessing parameter quantity and output similarity with the working network, distilling analogous subnets within the working network to mitigate reliance on rehearsal buffers and facilitating knowledge transfer across previous tasks. To enhance storage resource utilization, we then propose Subnet Constraint Experience Replay to optimize rehearsal efficiency through a sample storage strategy based on the structures of representative networks. Extensive experiments conducted predominantly on cloud environments with diverse datasets and also spanning the edge environment demonstrate that E2Net consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods. In addition, our method outperforms competitors in terms of both storage and computational requirements.

Women are at higher risk of Alzheimer's and other neurological diseases after menopause, and yet research connecting female brain health to sex hormone fluctuations is limited. We seek to investigate this connection by developing tools that quantify 3D shape changes that occur in the brain during sex hormone fluctuations. Geodesic regression on the space of 3D discrete surfaces offers a principled way to characterize the evolution of a brain's shape. However, in its current form, this approach is too computationally expensive for practical use. In this paper, we propose approximation schemes that accelerate geodesic regression on shape spaces of 3D discrete surfaces. We also provide rules of thumb for when each approximation can be used. We test our approach on synthetic data to quantify the speed-accuracy trade-off of these approximations and show that practitioners can expect very significant speed-up while only sacrificing little accuracy. Finally, we apply the method to real brain shape data and produce the first characterization of how the female hippocampus changes shape during the menstrual cycle as a function of progesterone: a characterization made (practically) possible by our approximation schemes. Our work paves the way for comprehensive, practical shape analyses in the fields of bio-medicine and computer vision. Our implementation is publicly available on GitHub: https://github.com/bioshape-lab/my28brains.

5G introduced modularized network functions (NFs) to support emerging services in a more flexible and elastic manner. To mitigate the complexity in such modularized NF management, automated network operation and management are indispensable, and thus the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) has introduced a network data analytics function (NWDAF). However, a conventional NWDAF needs to conduct both inference and training tasks, and thus it is difficult to provide the analytics results to NFs in a timely manner for an increased number of analytics requests. In this article, we propose a hierarchical network data analytics framework (H-NDAF) where inference tasks are distributed to multiple leaf NWDAFs and training tasks are conducted at the root NWDAF. Extensive simulation results using open-source software (i.e., free5GC) demonstrate that H-NDAF can provide sufficiently accurate analytics and faster analytics provision time compared to the conventional NWDAF.

Class imbalance is a major problem in many real world classification tasks. Due to the imbalance in the number of samples, the support vector machine (SVM) classifier gets biased toward the majority class. Furthermore, these samples are often observed with a certain degree of noise. Therefore, to remove these problems we propose a novel fuzzy based approach to deal with class imbalanced as well noisy datasets. We propose two approaches to address these problems. The first approach is based on the intuitionistic fuzzy membership, termed as robust energy-based intuitionistic fuzzy least squares twin support vector machine (IF-RELSTSVM). Furthermore, we introduce the concept of hyperplane-based fuzzy membership in our second approach, where the final classifier is termed as robust energy-based fuzzy least square twin support vector machine (F-RELSTSVM). By using this technique, the membership values are based on a projection based approach, where the data points are projected on the hyperplanes. The performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated on several benchmark and synthetic datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed IF-RELSTSVM and F-RELSTSVM models outperform the baseline algorithms. Statistical tests are performed to check the significance of the proposed algorithms. The results show the applicability of the proposed algorithms on noisy as well as imbalanced datasets.

Vision Transformer (ViT) has emerged as a powerful architecture in the realm of modern computer vision. However, its application in certain imaging fields, such as microscopy and satellite imaging, presents unique challenges. In these domains, images often contain multiple channels, each carrying semantically distinct and independent information. Furthermore, the model must demonstrate robustness to sparsity in input channels, as they may not be densely available during training or testing. In this paper, we propose a modification to the ViT architecture that enhances reasoning across the input channels and introduce Hierarchical Channel Sampling (HCS) as an additional regularization technique to ensure robustness when only partial channels are presented during test time. Our proposed model, ChannelViT, constructs patch tokens independently from each input channel and utilizes a learnable channel embedding that is added to the patch tokens, similar to positional embeddings. We evaluate the performance of ChannelViT on ImageNet, JUMP-CP (microscopy cell imaging), and So2Sat (satellite imaging). Our results show that ChannelViT outperforms ViT on classification tasks and generalizes well, even when a subset of input channels is used during testing. Across our experiments, HCS proves to be a powerful regularizer, independent of the architecture employed, suggesting itself as a straightforward technique for robust ViT training. Lastly, we find that ChannelViT generalizes effectively even when there is limited access to all channels during training, highlighting its potential for multi-channel imaging under real-world conditions with sparse sensors.

In order to support the advancement of machine learning methods for predicting time-series data, we present a comprehensive dataset designed explicitly for long-term time-series forecasting. We incorporate a collection of datasets obtained from diverse, dynamic systems and real-life records. Each dataset is standardized by dividing it into training and test trajectories with predetermined lookback lengths. We include trajectories of length up to $2000$ to ensure a reliable evaluation of long-term forecasting capabilities. To determine the most effective model in diverse scenarios, we conduct an extensive benchmarking analysis using classical and state-of-the-art models, namely LSTM, DeepAR, NLinear, N-Hits, PatchTST, and LatentODE. Our findings reveal intriguing performance comparisons among these models, highlighting the dataset-dependent nature of model effectiveness. Notably, we introduce a custom latent NLinear model and enhance DeepAR with a curriculum learning phase. Both consistently outperform their vanilla counterparts.

Quantifying the dependence between high-dimensional random variables is central to statistical learning and inference. Two classical methods are canonical correlation analysis (CCA), which identifies maximally correlated projected versions of the original variables, and Shannon's mutual information, which is a universal dependence measure that also captures high-order dependencies. However, CCA only accounts for linear dependence, which may be insufficient for certain applications, while mutual information is often infeasible to compute/estimate in high dimensions. This work proposes a middle ground in the form of a scalable information-theoretic generalization of CCA, termed max-sliced mutual information (mSMI). mSMI equals the maximal mutual information between low-dimensional projections of the high-dimensional variables, which reduces back to CCA in the Gaussian case. It enjoys the best of both worlds: capturing intricate dependencies in the data while being amenable to fast computation and scalable estimation from samples. We show that mSMI retains favorable structural properties of Shannon's mutual information, like variational forms and identification of independence. We then study statistical estimation of mSMI, propose an efficiently computable neural estimator, and couple it with formal non-asymptotic error bounds. We present experiments that demonstrate the utility of mSMI for several tasks, encompassing independence testing, multi-view representation learning, algorithmic fairness, and generative modeling. We observe that mSMI consistently outperforms competing methods with little-to-no computational overhead.

Current methods of imitation learning (IL), primarily based on deep neural networks, offer efficient means for obtaining driving policies from real-world data but suffer from significant limitations in interpretability and generalizability. These shortcomings are particularly concerning in safety-critical applications like autonomous driving. In this paper, we address these limitations by introducing Symbolic Imitation Learning (SIL), a groundbreaking method that employs Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) to learn driving policies which are transparent, explainable and generalisable from available datasets. Utilizing the real-world highD dataset, we subject our method to a rigorous comparative analysis against prevailing neural-network-based IL methods. Our results demonstrate that SIL not only enhances the interpretability of driving policies but also significantly improves their applicability across varied driving situations. Hence, this work offers a novel pathway to more reliable and safer autonomous driving systems, underscoring the potential of integrating ILP into the domain of IL.

This work reports the empirical performance of an automated medical landmark detection method for predict clinical markers in hip radiograph images. Notably, the detection method was trained using a label-only augmentation scheme; our results indicate that this form of augmentation outperforms traditional data augmentation and produces highly sample efficient estimators. We train a generic U-Net-based architecture under a curriculum consisting of two phases: initially relaxing the landmarking task by enlarging the label points to regions, then gradually eroding these label regions back to the base task. We measure the benefits of this approach on six datasets of radiographs with gold-standard expert annotations.  ( 2 min )

Modern streaming data categorization faces significant challenges from concept drift and class imbalanced data. This negatively impacts the output of the classifier, leading to improper classification. Furthermore, other factors such as the overlapping of multiple classes limit the extent of the correctness of the output. This work proposes a novel framework for integrating data pre-processing and dynamic ensemble selection, by formulating the classification framework for the nonstationary drifting imbalanced data stream, which employs the data pre-processing and dynamic ensemble selection techniques. The proposed framework was evaluated using six artificially generated data streams with differing imbalance ratios in combination with two different types of concept drifts. Each stream is composed of 200 chunks of 500 objects described by eight features and contains five concept drifts. Seven pre-processing techniques and two dynamic ensemble selection methods were considered. According to experimental results, data pre-processing combined with Dynamic Ensemble Selection techniques significantly delivers more accuracy when dealing with imbalanced data streams.

High-quality face images are required to guarantee the stability and reliability of automatic face recognition (FR) systems in surveillance and security scenarios. However, a massive amount of face data is usually compressed before being analyzed due to limitations on transmission or storage. The compressed images may lose the powerful identity information, resulting in the performance degradation of the FR system. Herein, we make the first attempt to study just noticeable difference (JND) for the FR system, which can be defined as the maximum distortion that the FR system cannot notice. More specifically, we establish a JND dataset including 3530 original images and 137,670 compressed images generated by advanced reference encoding/decoding software based on the Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard (VTM-15.0). Subsequently, we develop a novel JND prediction model to directly infer JND images for the FR system. In particular, in order to maximum redundancy removal without impairment of robust identity information, we apply the encoder with multiple feature extraction and attention-based feature decomposition modules to progressively decompose face features into two uncorrelated components, i.e., identity and residual features, via self-supervised learning. Then, the residual feature is fed into the decoder to generate the residual map. Finally, the predicted JND map is obtained by subtracting the residual map from the original image. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed model achieves higher accuracy of JND map prediction compared with the state-of-the-art JND models, and is capable of saving more bits while maintaining the performance of the FR system compared with VTM-15.0.

We consider the image transmission problem over a noisy wireless channel via deep learning-based joint source-channel coding (DeepJSCC) along with a denoising diffusion probabilistic model (DDPM) at the receiver. Specifically, we are interested in the perception-distortion trade-off in the practical finite block length regime, in which separate source and channel coding can be highly suboptimal. We introduce a novel scheme that utilizes the range-null space decomposition of the target image. We transmit the range-space of the image after encoding and employ DDPM to progressively refine its null space contents. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate significant improvements in distortion and perceptual quality of reconstructed images compared to standard DeepJSCC and the state-of-the-art generative learning-based method. We will publicly share our source code to facilitate further research and reproducibility.

Machine learning using quantum convolutional neural networks (QCNNs) has demonstrated success in both quantum and classical data classification. In previous studies, QCNNs attained a higher classification accuracy than their classical counterparts under the same training conditions in the few-parameter regime. However, the general performance of large-scale quantum models is difficult to examine because of the limited size of quantum circuits, which can be reliably implemented in the near future. We propose transfer learning as an effective strategy for utilizing small QCNNs in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum era to the full extent. In the classical-to-quantum transfer learning framework, a QCNN can solve complex classification problems without requiring a large-scale quantum circuit by utilizing a pre-trained classical convolutional neural network (CNN). We perform numerical simulations of QCNN models with various sets of quantum convolution and pooling operations for MNIST data classification under transfer learning, in which a classical CNN is trained with Fashion-MNIST data. The results show that transfer learning from classical to quantum CNN performs considerably better than purely classical transfer learning models under similar training conditions.

Hierarchical Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) are among the most popular likelihood-based generative models. There is a consensus that the top-down hierarchical VAEs allow effective learning of deep latent structures and avoid problems like posterior collapse. Here, we show that this is not necessarily the case, and the problem of collapsing posteriors remains. To discourage this issue, we propose a deep hierarchical VAE with a context on top. Specifically, we use a Discrete Cosine Transform to obtain the last latent variable. In a series of experiments, we observe that the proposed modification allows us to achieve better utilization of the latent space and does not harm the model's generative abilities.

As researchers strive to narrow the gap between machine intelligence and human through the development of artificial intelligence technologies, it is imperative that we recognize the critical importance of trustworthiness in open-world, which has become ubiquitous in all aspects of daily life for everyone. However, several challenges may create a crisis of trust in current artificial intelligence systems that need to be bridged: 1) Insufficient explanation of predictive results; 2) Inadequate generalization for learning models; 3) Poor adaptability to uncertain environments. Consequently, we explore a neural program to bridge trustworthiness and open-world learning, extending from single-modal to multi-modal scenarios for readers. 1) To enhance design-level interpretability, we first customize trustworthy networks with specific physical meanings; 2) We then design environmental well-being task-interfaces via flexible learning regularizers for improving the generalization of trustworthy learning; 3) We propose to increase the robustness of trustworthy learning by integrating open-world recognition losses with agent mechanisms. Eventually, we enhance various trustworthy properties through the establishment of design-level explainability, environmental well-being task-interfaces and open-world recognition programs. These designed open-world protocols are applicable across a wide range of surroundings, under open-world multimedia recognition scenarios with significant performance improvements observed.

In the domain of semi-supervised learning, the current approaches insufficiently exploit the potential of considering inter-instance relationships among (un)labeled data. In this work, we address this limitation by providing an approach for inferring latent graphs that capture the intrinsic data relationships. By leveraging graph-based representations, our approach facilitates the seamless propagation of information throughout the graph, enabling the effective incorporation of global and local knowledge. Through evaluations on biomedical tabular datasets, we compare the capabilities of our approach to other contemporary methods. Our work demonstrates the significance of inter-instance relationship discovery as practical means for constructing robust latent graphs to enhance semi-supervised learning techniques. Our method achieves state-of-the-art results on three biomedical datasets.

Sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) has well documented merits in enhancing generalization of deep neural networks, even without sizable data augmentation. Embracing the geometry of the loss function, where neighborhoods of 'flat minima' heighten generalization ability, SAM seeks 'flat valleys' by minimizing the maximum loss caused by an adversary perturbing parameters within the neighborhood. Although critical to account for sharpness of the loss function, such an 'over-friendly adversary' can curtail the outmost level of generalization. The novel approach of this contribution fosters stabilization of adversaries through variance suppression (VaSSO) to avoid such friendliness. VaSSO's provable stability safeguards its numerical improvement over SAM in model-agnostic tasks, including image classification and machine translation. In addition, experiments confirm that VaSSO endows SAM with robustness against high levels of label noise.

The accurate representation of precipitation in Earth system models (ESMs) is crucial for reliable projections of the ecological and socioeconomic impacts in response to anthropogenic global warming. The complex cross-scale interactions of processes that produce precipitation are challenging to model, however, inducing potentially strong biases in ESM fields, especially regarding extremes. State-of-the-art bias correction methods only address errors in the simulated frequency distributions locally at every individual grid cell. Improving unrealistic spatial patterns of the ESM output, which would require spatial context, has not been possible so far. Here, we show that a post-processing method based on physically constrained generative adversarial networks (cGANs) can correct biases of a state-of-the-art, CMIP6-class ESM both in local frequency distributions and in the spatial patterns at once. While our method improves local frequency distributions equally well as gold-standard bias-adjustment frameworks, it strongly outperforms any existing methods in the correction of spatial patterns, especially in terms of the characteristic spatial intermittency of precipitation extremes.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have proven their exceptional capabilities in performing language-related tasks. However, their deployment poses significant challenges due to their considerable memory and storage requirements. In response to this issue, weight-only quantization, particularly 3 and 4-bit weight-only quantization, has emerged as one of the most viable solutions. As the number of bits decreases, the quantization grid broadens, thus emphasizing the importance of up and down rounding. While previous studies have demonstrated that fine-tuning up and down rounding with the addition of perturbations can enhance accuracy in some scenarios, our study is driven by the precise and limited boundary of these perturbations, where only the threshold for altering the rounding value is of significance. Consequently, we propose a concise and highly effective approach for optimizing the weight rounding task. Our method, named SignRound, involves lightweight block-wise tuning using signed gradient descent, enabling us to achieve outstanding results within 400 steps. SignRound competes impressively against recent methods without introducing additional inference overhead. The source code will be publicly available at \url{https://github.com/intel/neural-compressor} soon.

Autonomous systems (AS) often use Deep Neural Network (DNN) classifiers to allow them to operate in complex, high-dimensional, non-linear, and dynamically changing environments. Due to the complexity of these environments, DNN classifiers may output misclassifications during operation when they face domains not identified during development. Removing a system from operation for retraining becomes impractical as the number of such AS increases. To increase AS reliability and overcome this limitation, DNN classifiers need to have the ability to adapt during operation when faced with different operational domains using a few samples (e.g. 100 samples). However, retraining DNNs on a few samples is known to cause catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we introduce Dynamic Incremental Regularised Adaptation (DIRA), a framework for operational domain adaption of DNN classifiers using regularisation techniques to overcome catastrophic forgetting and achieve adaptation when retraining using a few samples of the target domain. Our approach shows improvements on different image classification benchmarks aimed at evaluating robustness to distribution shifts (e.g.CIFAR-10C/100C, ImageNet-C), and produces state-of-the-art performance in comparison with other frameworks from the literature.

Many emerging user-facing services adopt Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to improve serving accuracy. When the graph used by a GNN model changes, representations (embedding) of nodes in the graph should be updated accordingly. However, the node representation update is too slow, resulting in either long response latency of user queries (the inference is performed after the update completes) or high staleness problem (the inference is performed based on stale data). Our in-depth analysis shows that the slow update is mainly due to neighbor explosion problem in graphs and duplicated computation. Based on such findings, we propose STAG, a GNN serving framework that enables low latency and low staleness of GNN-based services. It comprises a collaborative serving mechanism and an additivity-based incremental propagation strategy. With the collaborative serving mechanism, only part of node representations are updated during the update phase, and the final representations are calculated in the inference phase. It alleviates the neighbor explosion problem. The additivity-based incremental propagation strategy reuses intermediate data during the update phase, eliminating duplicated computation problem. Experimental results show that STAG accelerates the update phase by 1.3x~90.1x, and greatly reduces staleness time with a slight increase in response latency.

Exact computation of the partition function is known to be intractable, necessitating approximate inference techniques. Existing methods for approximate inference are slow to converge for many benchmarks. The control of accuracy-complexity trade-off is also non-trivial in many of these methods. We propose a novel incremental build-infer-approximate (IBIA) framework for approximate inference that addresses these issues. In this framework, the probabilistic graphical model is converted into a sequence of clique tree forests (SCTF) with bounded clique sizes. We show that the SCTF can be used to efficiently compute the partition function. We propose two new algorithms which are used to construct the SCTF and prove the correctness of both. The first is an algorithm for incremental construction of CTFs that is guaranteed to give a valid CTF with bounded clique sizes and the second is an approximation algorithm that takes a calibrated CTF as input and yields a valid and calibrated CTF with reduced clique sizes as the output. We have evaluated our method using several benchmark sets from recent UAI competitions and our results show good accuracies with competitive runtimes.

Decision forests are widely used for classification and regression tasks. A lesser known property of tree-based methods is that one can construct a proximity matrix from the tree(s), and these proximity matrices are induced kernels. While there has been extensive research on the applications and properties of kernels, there is relatively little research on kernels induced by decision forests. We construct Kernel Mean Embedding Random Forests (KMERF), which induce kernels from random trees and/or forests using leaf-node proximity. We introduce the notion of an asymptotically characteristic kernel, and prove that KMERF kernels are asymptotically characteristic for both discrete and continuous data. Because KMERF is data-adaptive, we suspected it would outperform kernels selected a priori on finite sample data. We illustrate that KMERF nearly dominates current state-of-the-art kernel-based tests across a diverse range of high-dimensional two-sample and independence testing settings. Furthermore, our forest-based approach is interpretable, and provides feature importance metrics that readily distinguish important dimensions, unlike other high-dimensional non-parametric testing procedures. Hence, this work demonstrates the decision forest-based kernel can be more powerful and more interpretable than existing methods, flying in the face of conventional wisdom of the trade-off between the two.

Regularization plays a crucial role in machine learning models, especially for deep neural networks. The existing regularization techniques mainly rely on the i.i.d. assumption and only consider the knowledge from the current sample, without the leverage of the neighboring relationship between samples. In this work, we propose a general regularizer called \textbf{Patch-level Neighborhood Interpolation~(Pani)} that conducts a non-local representation in the computation of networks. Our proposal explicitly constructs patch-level graphs in different layers and then linearly interpolates neighborhood patch features, serving as a general and effective regularization strategy. Further, we customize our approach into two kinds of popular regularization methods, namely Virtual Adversarial Training (VAT) and MixUp as well as its variants. The first derived \textbf{Pani VAT} presents a novel way to construct non-local adversarial smoothness by employing patch-level interpolated perturbations. The second derived \textbf{Pani MixUp} method extends the MixUp, and achieves superiority over MixUp and competitive performance over state-of-the-art variants of MixUp method with a significant advantage in computational efficiency. Extensive experiments have verified the effectiveness of our Pani approach in both supervised and semi-supervised settings.

We study the multiclass classification problem where the features come from the mixture of time-homogeneous diffusions. Specifically, the classes are discriminated by their drift functions while the diffusion coefficient is common to all classes and unknown. In this framework, we build a plug-in classifier which relies on nonparametric estimators of the drift and diffusion functions. We first establish the consistency of our classification procedure under mild assumptions and then provide rates of cnvergence under different set of assumptions. Finally, a numerical study supports our theoretical findings.

The growing penetration of intermittent, renewable generation in US power grids, especially wind and solar generation, results in increased operational uncertainty. In that context, accurate forecasts are critical, especially for wind generation, which exhibits large variability and is historically harder to predict. To overcome this challenge, this work proposes a novel Bundle-Predict-Reconcile (BPR) framework that integrates asset bundling, machine learning, and forecast reconciliation techniques. The BPR framework first learns an intermediate hierarchy level (the bundles), then predicts wind power at the asset, bundle, and fleet level, and finally reconciles all forecasts to ensure consistency. This approach effectively introduces an auxiliary learning task (predicting the bundle-level time series) to help the main learning tasks. The paper also introduces new asset-bundling criteria that capture the spatio-temporal dynamics of wind power time series. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted on an industry-size dataset of 283 wind farms in the MISO footprint. The experiments consider short-term and day-ahead forecasts, and evaluates a large variety of forecasting models that include weather predictions as covariates. The results demonstrate the benefits of BPR, which consistently and significantly improves forecast accuracy over baselines, especially at the fleet level.

We investigate the high-dimensional properties of robust regression estimators in the presence of heavy-tailed contamination of both the covariates and response functions. In particular, we provide a sharp asymptotic characterisation of M-estimators trained on a family of elliptical covariate and noise data distributions including cases where second and higher moments do not exist. We show that, despite being consistent, the Huber loss with optimally tuned location parameter $\delta$ is suboptimal in the high-dimensional regime in the presence of heavy-tailed noise, highlighting the necessity of further regularisation to achieve optimal performance. This result also uncovers the existence of a curious transition in $\delta$ as a function of the sample complexity and contamination. Moreover, we derive the decay rates for the excess risk of ridge regression. We show that, while it is both optimal and universal for noise distributions with finite second moment, its decay rate can be considerably faster when the covariates' second moment does not exist. Finally, we show that our formulas readily generalise to a richer family of models and data distributions, such as generalised linear estimation with arbitrary convex regularisation trained on mixture models.

Many real-world processes have complex tail dependence structures that cannot be characterized using classical Gaussian processes. More flexible spatial extremes models exhibit appealing extremal dependence properties but are often exceedingly prohibitive to fit and simulate from in high dimensions. In this paper, we develop a new spatial extremes model that has flexible and non-stationary dependence properties, and we integrate it in the encoding-decoding structure of a variational autoencoder (XVAE), whose parameters are estimated via variational Bayes combined with deep learning. The XVAE can be used as a spatio-temporal emulator that characterizes the distribution of potential mechanistic model output states and produces outputs that have the same statistical properties as the inputs, especially in the tail. As an aside, our approach also provides a novel way of making fast inference with complex extreme-value processes. Through extensive simulation studies, we show that our XVAE is substantially more time-efficient than traditional Bayesian inference while also outperforming many spatial extremes models with a stationary dependence structure. To further demonstrate the computational power of the XVAE, we analyze a high-resolution satellite-derived dataset of sea surface temperature in the Red Sea, which includes 30 years of daily measurements at 16703 grid cells. We find that the extremal dependence strength is weaker in the interior of Red Sea and it has decreased slightly over time.

Unsupervised fact verification aims to verify a claim using evidence from a trustworthy knowledge base without any kind of data annotation. To address this challenge, algorithms must produce features for every claim that are both semantically meaningful, and compact enough to find a semantic alignment with the source information. In contrast to previous work, which tackled the alignment problem by learning over annotated corpora of claims and their corresponding labels, we propose SFAVEL (Self-supervised Fact Verification via Language Model Distillation), a novel unsupervised framework that leverages pre-trained language models to distil self-supervised features into high-quality claim-fact alignments without the need for annotations. This is enabled by a novel contrastive loss function that encourages features to attain high-quality claim and evidence alignments whilst preserving the semantic relationships across the corpora. Notably, we present results that achieve a new state-of-the-art on the standard FEVER fact verification benchmark (+8% accuracy) with linear evaluation.  ( 2 min )

The cost of hyperparameter tuning in deep learning has been rising with model sizes, prompting practitioners to find new tuning methods using a proxy of smaller networks. One such proposal uses $\mu$P parameterized networks, where the optimal hyperparameters for small width networks transfer to networks with arbitrarily large width. However, in this scheme, hyperparameters do not transfer across depths. As a remedy, we study residual networks with a residual branch scale of $1/\sqrt{\text{depth}}$ in combination with the $\mu$P parameterization. We provide experiments demonstrating that residual architectures including convolutional ResNets and Vision Transformers trained with this parameterization exhibit transfer of optimal hyperparameters across width and depth on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet. Furthermore, our empirical findings are supported and motivated by theory. Using recent developments in the dynamical mean field theory (DMFT) description of neural network learning dynamics, we show that this parameterization of ResNets admits a well-defined feature learning joint infinite-width and infinite-depth limit and show convergence of finite-size network dynamics towards this limit.

Langevin dynamics are widely used in sampling high-dimensional, non-Gaussian distributions whose densities are known up to a normalizing constant. In particular, there is strong interest in unadjusted Langevin algorithms (ULA), which directly discretize Langevin dynamics to estimate expectations over the target distribution. We study the use of transport maps that approximately normalize a target distribution as a way to precondition and accelerate the convergence of Langevin dynamics. We show that in continuous time, when a transport map is applied to Langevin dynamics, the result is a Riemannian manifold Langevin dynamics (RMLD) with metric defined by the transport map. We also show that applying a transport map to an irreversibly-perturbed ULA results in a geometry-informed irreversible perturbation (GiIrr) of the original dynamics. These connections suggest more systematic ways of learning metrics and perturbations, and also yield alternative discretizations of the RMLD described by the map, which we study. Under appropriate conditions, these discretized processes can be endowed with non-asymptotic bounds describing convergence to the target distribution in 2-Wasserstein distance. Illustrative numerical results complement our theoretical claims.

We introduce the modified planar rotator method (MPRS), a physically inspired machine learning method for spatial/temporal regression. MPRS is a non-parametric model which incorporates spatial or temporal correlations via short-range, distance-dependent ``interactions'' without assuming a specific form for the underlying probability distribution. Predictions are obtained by means of a fully autonomous learning algorithm which employs equilibrium conditional Monte Carlo simulations. MPRS is able to handle scattered data and arbitrary spatial dimensions. We report tests on various synthetic and real-word data in one, two and three dimensions which demonstrate that the MPRS prediction performance (without parameter tuning) is competitive with standard interpolation methods such as ordinary kriging and inverse distance weighting. In particular, MPRS is a particularly effective gap-filling method for rough and non-Gaussian data (e.g., daily precipitation time series). MPRS shows superior computational efficiency and scalability for large samples. Massive data sets involving millions of nodes can be processed in a few seconds on a standard personal computer.  ( 2 min )

The standard paired-sample testing approach in the multidimensional setting applies multiple univariate tests on the individual features, followed by p-value adjustments. Such an approach suffers when the data carry numerous features. A number of studies have shown that classification accuracy can be seen as a proxy for two-sample testing. However, neither theoretical foundations nor practical recipes have been proposed so far on how this strategy could be extended to multidimensional paired-sample testing. In this work, we put forward the idea that scoring functions can be produced by the decision rules defined by the perpendicular bisecting hyperplanes of the line segments connecting each pair of instances. Then, the optimal scoring function can be obtained by the pseudomedian of those rules, which we estimate by extending naturally the Hodges-Lehmann estimator. We accordingly propose a framework of a two-step testing procedure. First, we estimate the bisecting hyperplanes for each pair of instances and an aggregated rule derived through the Hodges-Lehmann estimator. The paired samples are scored by this aggregated rule to produce a unidimensional representation. Second, we perform a Wilcoxon signed-rank test on the obtained representation. Our experiments indicate that our approach has substantial performance gains in testing accuracy compared to the traditional multivariate and multiple testing, while at the same time estimates each feature's contribution to the final result.  ( 2 min )

In this paper, we introduce a novel analysis of neural networks based on geometric (Clifford) algebra and convex optimization. We show that optimal weights of deep ReLU neural networks are given by the wedge product of training samples when trained with standard regularized loss. Furthermore, the training problem reduces to convex optimization over wedge product features, which encode the geometric structure of the training dataset. This structure is given in terms of signed volumes of triangles and parallelotopes generated by data vectors. The convex problem finds a small subset of samples via $\ell_1$ regularization to discover only relevant wedge product features. Our analysis provides a novel perspective on the inner workings of deep neural networks and sheds light on the role of the hidden layers.  ( 2 min )

Graphon estimation has been one of the most fundamental problems in network analysis and has received considerable attention in the past decade. From the statistical perspective, the minimax error rate of graphon estimation has been established by Gao et al (2015) for both stochastic block model (SBM) and nonparametric graphon estimation. The statistical optimal estimators are based on constrained least squares and have computational complexity exponential in the dimension. From the computational perspective, the best-known polynomial-time estimator is based on universal singular value thresholding (USVT), but it can only achieve a much slower estimation error rate than the minimax one. It is natural to wonder if such a gap is essential. The computational optimality of the USVT or the existence of a computational barrier in graphon estimation has been a long-standing open problem. In this work, we take the first step towards it and provide rigorous evidence for the computational barrier in graphon estimation via low-degree polynomials. Specifically, in both SBM and nonparametric graphon estimation, we show that for low-degree polynomial estimators, their estimation error rates cannot be significantly better than that of the USVT under a wide range of parameter regimes. Our results are proved based on the recent development of low-degree polynomials by Schramm and Wein (2022), while we overcome a few key challenges in applying it to the general graphon estimation problem. By leveraging our main results, we also provide a computational lower bound on the clustering error for community detection in SBM with a growing number of communities and this yields a new piece of evidence for the conjectured Kesten-Stigum threshold for efficient community recovery.

Neural networks have achieved remarkable performance across various problem domains, but their widespread applicability is hindered by inherent limitations such as overconfidence in predictions, lack of interpretability, and vulnerability to adversarial attacks. To address these challenges, Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) have emerged as a compelling extension of conventional neural networks, integrating uncertainty estimation into their predictive capabilities. This comprehensive primer presents a systematic introduction to the fundamental concepts of neural networks and Bayesian inference, elucidating their synergistic integration for the development of BNNs. The target audience comprises statisticians with a potential background in Bayesian methods but lacking deep learning expertise, as well as machine learners proficient in deep neural networks but with limited exposure to Bayesian statistics. We provide an overview of commonly employed priors, examining their impact on model behavior and performance. Additionally, we delve into the practical considerations associated with training and inference in BNNs. Furthermore, we explore advanced topics within the realm of BNN research, acknowledging the existence of ongoing debates and controversies. By offering insights into cutting-edge developments, this primer not only equips researchers and practitioners with a solid foundation in BNNs, but also illuminates the potential applications of this dynamic field. As a valuable resource, it fosters an understanding of BNNs and their promising prospects, facilitating further advancements in the pursuit of knowledge and innovation.

Semi-supervised learning (SSL) is a promising approach for training deep classification models using labeled and unlabeled datasets. However, existing SSL methods rely on a large unlabeled dataset, which may not always be available in many real-world applications due to legal constraints (e.g., GDPR). In this paper, we investigate the research question: Can we train SSL models without real unlabeled datasets? Instead of using real unlabeled datasets, we propose an SSL method using synthetic datasets generated from generative foundation models trained on datasets containing millions of samples in diverse domains (e.g., ImageNet). Our main concepts are identifying synthetic samples that emulate unlabeled samples from generative foundation models and training classifiers using these synthetic samples. To achieve this, our method is formulated as an alternating optimization problem: (i) meta-learning of generative foundation models and (ii) SSL of classifiers using real labeled and synthetic unlabeled samples. For (i), we propose a meta-learning objective that optimizes latent variables to generate samples that resemble real labeled samples and minimize the validation loss. For (ii), we propose a simple unsupervised loss function that regularizes the feature extractors of classifiers to maximize the performance improvement obtained from synthetic samples. We confirm that our method outperforms baselines using generative foundation models on SSL. We also demonstrate that our methods outperform SSL using real unlabeled datasets in scenarios with extremely small amounts of labeled datasets. This suggests that synthetic samples have the potential to provide improvement gains more efficiently than real unlabeled data.  ( 3 min )

Batch reinforcement learning (RL) defines the task of learning from a fixed batch of data lacking exhaustive exploration. Worst-case optimality algorithms, which calibrate a value-function model class from logged experience and perform some type of pessimistic evaluation under the learned model, have emerged as a promising paradigm for batch RL. However, contemporary works on this stream have commonly overlooked the hierarchical decision-making structure hidden in the optimization landscape. In this paper, we adopt a game-theoretical viewpoint and model the policy learning diagram as a two-player general-sum game with a leader-follower structure. We propose a novel stochastic gradient-based learning algorithm: StackelbergLearner, in which the leader player updates according to the total derivative of its objective instead of the usual individual gradient, and the follower player makes individual updates and ensures transition-consistent pessimistic reasoning. The derived learning dynamic naturally lends StackelbergLearner to a game-theoretic interpretation and provides a convergence guarantee to differentiable Stackelberg equilibria. From a theoretical standpoint, we provide instance-dependent regret bounds with general function approximation, which shows that our algorithm can learn a best-effort policy that is able to compete against any comparator policy that is covered by batch data. Notably, our theoretical regret guarantees only require realizability without any data coverage and strong function approximation conditions, e.g., Bellman closedness, which is in contrast to prior works lacking such guarantees. Through comprehensive experiments, we find that our algorithm consistently performs as well or better as compared to state-of-the-art methods in batch RL benchmark and real-world datasets.

Contrastive learning is a self-supervised representation learning framework, where two positive views generated through data augmentation are made similar by an attraction force in a data representation space, while a repulsive force makes them far from negative examples. Non-contrastive learning, represented by BYOL and SimSiam, further gets rid of negative examples and improves computational efficiency. While learned representations may collapse into a single point due to the lack of the repulsive force at first sight, Tian et al. (2021) revealed through the learning dynamics analysis that the representations can avoid collapse if data augmentation is sufficiently stronger than regularization. However, their analysis does not take into account commonly-used feature normalization, a normalizer before measuring the similarity of representations, and hence excessively strong regularization may collapse the dynamics, which is an unnatural behavior under the presence of feature normalization. Therefore, we extend the previous theory based on the L2 loss by considering the cosine loss, which involves feature normalization. We show that the cosine loss induces sixth-order dynamics (while the L2 loss induces a third-order one), in which a stable equilibrium dynamically emerges even if there are only collapsed solutions with given initial parameters. Thus, we offer a new understanding that feature normalization plays an important role in robustly preventing the dynamics collapse.

We propose a novel framework that combines deep generative time series models with decision theory for generating personalized treatment strategies. It leverages historical patient trajectory data to jointly learn the generation of realistic personalized treatment and future outcome trajectories through deep generative time series models. In particular, our framework enables the generation of novel multivariate treatment strategies tailored to the personalized patient history and trained for optimal expected future outcomes based on conditional expected utility maximization. We demonstrate our framework by generating personalized insulin treatment strategies and blood glucose predictions for hospitalized diabetes patients, showcasing the potential of our approach for generating improved personalized treatment strategies. Keywords: deep generative model, probabilistic decision support, personalized treatment generation, insulin and blood glucose prediction  ( 2 min )

As researchers strive to narrow the gap between machine intelligence and human through the development of artificial intelligence technologies, it is imperative that we recognize the critical importance of trustworthiness in open-world, which has become ubiquitous in all aspects of daily life for everyone. However, several challenges may create a crisis of trust in current artificial intelligence systems that need to be bridged: 1) Insufficient explanation of predictive results; 2) Inadequate generalization for learning models; 3) Poor adaptability to uncertain environments. Consequently, we explore a neural program to bridge trustworthiness and open-world learning, extending from single-modal to multi-modal scenarios for readers. 1) To enhance design-level interpretability, we first customize trustworthy networks with specific physical meanings; 2) We then design environmental well-being task-interfaces via flexible learning regularizers for improving the generalization of trustworthy learning; 3) We propose to increase the robustness of trustworthy learning by integrating open-world recognition losses with agent mechanisms. Eventually, we enhance various trustworthy properties through the establishment of design-level explainability, environmental well-being task-interfaces and open-world recognition programs. These designed open-world protocols are applicable across a wide range of surroundings, under open-world multimedia recognition scenarios with significant performance improvements observed.

Hyperbolic spaces have been quite popular in the recent past for representing hierarchically organized data. Further, several classification algorithms for data in these spaces have been proposed in the literature. These algorithms mainly use either hyperplanes or geodesics for decision boundaries in a large margin classifiers setting leading to a non-convex optimization problem. In this paper, we propose a novel large margin classifier based on horospherical decision boundaries that leads to a geodesically convex optimization problem that can be optimized using any Riemannian gradient descent technique guaranteeing a globally optimal solution. We present several experiments depicting the competitive performance of our classifier in comparison to SOTA.

Pairwise comparison of graphs is key to many applications in Machine learning ranging from clustering, kernel-based classification/regression and more recently supervised graph prediction. Distances between graphs usually rely on informative representations of these structured objects such as bag of substructures or other graph embeddings. A recently popular solution consists in representing graphs as metric measure spaces, allowing to successfully leverage Optimal Transport, which provides meaningful distances allowing to compare them: the Gromov-Wasserstein distances. However, this family of distances overlooks edge attributes, which are essential for many structured objects. In this work, we introduce an extension of Gromov-Wasserstein distance for comparing graphs whose both nodes and edges have features. We propose novel algorithms for distance and barycenter computation. We empirically show the effectiveness of the novel distance in learning tasks where graphs occur in either input space or output space, such as classification and graph prediction.

We study the excess minimum risk in statistical inference, defined as the difference between the minimum expected loss in estimating a random variable from an observed feature vector and the minimum expected loss in estimating the same random variable from a transformation (statistic) of the feature vector. After characterizing lossless transformations, i.e., transformations for which the excess risk is zero for all loss functions, we construct a partitioning test statistic for the hypothesis that a given transformation is lossless and show that for i.i.d. data the test is strongly consistent. More generally, we develop information-theoretic upper bounds on the excess risk that uniformly hold over fairly general classes of loss functions. Based on these bounds, we introduce the notion of a delta-lossless transformation and give sufficient conditions for a given transformation to be universally delta-lossless. Applications to classification, nonparametric regression, portfolio strategies, information bottleneck, and deep learning, are also surveyed.

This paper identifies and addresses dynamic selection problems in online learning algorithms with endogenous data. In a contextual multi-armed bandit model, a novel bias (self-fulfilling bias) arises because the endogeneity of the data influences the choices of decisions, affecting the distribution of future data to be collected and analyzed. We propose an instrumental-variable-based algorithm to correct for the bias. It obtains true parameter values and attains low (logarithmic-like) regret levels. We also prove a central limit theorem for statistical inference. To establish the theoretical properties, we develop a general technique that untangles the interdependence between data and actions.

We provide results that exactly quantify how data augmentation affects the variance and limiting distribution of estimates, and analyze several specific models in detail. The results confirm some observations made in machine learning practice, but also lead to unexpected findings: Data augmentation may increase rather than decrease the uncertainty of estimates, such as the empirical prediction risk. It can act as a regularizer, but fails to do so in certain high-dimensional problems, and it may shift the double-descent peak of an empirical risk. Overall, the analysis shows that several properties data augmentation has been attributed with are not either true or false, but rather depend on a combination of factors -- notably the data distribution, the properties of the estimator, and the interplay of sample size, number of augmentations, and dimension. Our main theoretical tool is a limit theorem for functions of randomly transformed, high-dimensional random vectors. The proof draws on work in probability on noise stability of functions of many variables.

The increasing capabilities of large language models (LLMs) raise opportunities for artificial general intelligence but concurrently amplify safety concerns, such as potential misuse of AI systems, necessitating effective AI alignment. Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has emerged as a promising pathway towards AI alignment but brings forth challenges due to its complexity and dependence on a separate reward model. Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) has been proposed as an alternative, and it remains equivalent to RLHF under the reverse KL regularization constraint. This paper presents $f$-DPO, a generalized approach to DPO by incorporating diverse divergence constraints. We show that under certain $f$-divergences, including Jensen-Shannon divergence, forward KL divergences and $\alpha$-divergences, the complex relationship between the reward and optimal policy can also be simplified by addressing the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker conditions. This eliminates the need for estimating the normalizing constant in the Bradley-Terry model and enables a tractable mapping between the reward function and the optimal policy. Our approach optimizes LLMs to align with human preferences in a more efficient and supervised manner under a broad set of divergence constraints. Empirically, adopting these divergences ensures a balance between alignment performance and generation diversity. Importantly, $f$-DPO outperforms PPO-based methods in divergence efficiency, and divergence constraints directly influence expected calibration error (ECE).

Orbital-free density functional theory (OFDFT) is a quantum chemistry formulation that has a lower cost scaling than the prevailing Kohn-Sham DFT, which is increasingly desired for contemporary molecular research. However, its accuracy is limited by the kinetic energy density functional, which is notoriously hard to approximate for non-periodic molecular systems. In this work, we propose M-OFDFT, an OFDFT approach capable of solving molecular systems using a deep-learning functional model. We build the essential nonlocality into the model, which is made affordable by the concise density representation as expansion coefficients under an atomic basis. With techniques to address unconventional learning challenges therein, M-OFDFT achieves a comparable accuracy with Kohn-Sham DFT on a wide range of molecules untouched by OFDFT before. More attractively, M-OFDFT extrapolates well to molecules much larger than those in training, which unleashes the appealing scaling for studying large molecules including proteins, representing an advancement of the accuracy-efficiency trade-off frontier in quantum chemistry.

Nested simulation concerns estimating functionals of a conditional expectation via simulation. In this paper, we propose a new method based on kernel ridge regression to exploit the smoothness of the conditional expectation as a function of the multidimensional conditioning variable. Asymptotic analysis shows that the proposed method can effectively alleviate the curse of dimensionality on the convergence rate as the simulation budget increases, provided that the conditional expectation is sufficiently smooth. The smoothness bridges the gap between the cubic root convergence rate (that is, the optimal rate for the standard nested simulation) and the square root convergence rate (that is, the canonical rate for the standard Monte Carlo simulation). We demonstrate the performance of the proposed method via numerical examples from portfolio risk management and input uncertainty quantification.

Variance in predictions across different trained models is a significant, under-explored source of error in fair classification. In practice, the variance on some data examples is so large that decisions can be effectively arbitrary. To investigate this problem, we take an experimental approach and make four overarching contributions: We 1) Define a metric called self-consistency, derived from variance, which we use as a proxy for measuring and reducing arbitrariness; 2) Develop an ensembling algorithm that abstains from classification when a prediction would be arbitrary; 3) Conduct the largest to-date empirical study of the role of variance (vis-a-vis self-consistency and arbitrariness) in fair classification; and, 4) Release a toolkit that makes the US Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) datasets easily usable for future research. Altogether, our experiments reveal shocking insights about the reliability of conclusions on benchmark datasets. Most fairness classification benchmarks are close-to-fair when taking into account the amount of arbitrariness present in predictions -- before we even try to apply common fairness interventions. This finding calls into question the practical utility of common algorithmic fairness methods, and in turn suggests that we should fundamentally reconsider how we choose to measure fairness in machine learning.

Prediction with the possibility of abstention (or selective prediction) is an important problem for error-critical machine learning applications. While well-studied in the classification setup, selective approaches to regression are much less developed. In this work, we consider the nonparametric heteroskedastic regression problem and develop an abstention procedure via testing the hypothesis on the value of the conditional variance at a given point. Unlike existing methods, the proposed one allows to account not only for the value of the variance itself but also for the uncertainty of the corresponding variance predictor. We prove non-asymptotic bounds on the risk of the resulting estimator and show the existence of several different convergence regimes. Theoretical analysis is illustrated with a series of experiments on simulated and real-world data.

While reliable data-driven decision-making hinges on high-quality labeled data, the acquisition of quality labels often involves laborious human annotations or slow and expensive scientific measurements. Machine learning is becoming an appealing alternative as sophisticated predictive techniques are being used to quickly and cheaply produce large amounts of predicted labels; e.g., predicted protein structures are used to supplement experimentally derived structures, predictions of socioeconomic indicators from satellite imagery are used to supplement accurate survey data, and so on. Since predictions are imperfect and potentially biased, this practice brings into question the validity of downstream inferences. We introduce cross-prediction: a method for valid inference powered by machine learning. With a small labeled dataset and a large unlabeled dataset, cross-prediction imputes the missing labels via machine learning and applies a form of debiasing to remedy the prediction inaccuracies. The resulting inferences achieve the desired error probability and are more powerful than those that only leverage the labeled data. Closely related is the recent proposal of prediction-powered inference, which assumes that a good pre-trained model is already available. We show that cross-prediction is consistently more powerful than an adaptation of prediction-powered inference in which a fraction of the labeled data is split off and used to train the model. Finally, we observe that cross-prediction gives more stable conclusions than its competitors; its confidence intervals typically have significantly lower variability.

We study differentially private (DP) stochastic optimization (SO) with loss functions whose worst-case Lipschitz parameter over all data points may be extremely large. To date, the vast majority of work on DP SO assumes that the loss is uniformly Lipschitz continuous over data (i.e. stochastic gradients are uniformly bounded over all data points). While this assumption is convenient, it often leads to pessimistic excess risk bounds. In many practical problems, the worst-case (uniform) Lipschitz parameter of the loss over all data points may be extremely large due to outliers. In such cases, the error bounds for DP SO, which scale with the worst-case Lipschitz parameter of the loss, are vacuous. To address these limitations, this work provides near-optimal excess risk bounds that do not depend on the uniform Lipschitz parameter of the loss. Building on a recent line of work (Wang et al., 2020; Kamath et al., 2022), we assume that stochastic gradients have bounded $k$-th order moments for some $k \geq 2$. Compared with works on uniformly Lipschitz DP SO, our excess risk scales with the $k$-th moment bound instead of the uniform Lipschitz parameter of the loss, allowing for significantly faster rates in the presence of outliers and/or heavy-tailed data. For convex and strongly convex loss functions, we provide the first asymptotically optimal excess risk bounds (up to a logarithmic factor). In contrast to (Wang et al., 2020; Kamath et al., 2022), our bounds do not require the loss function to be differentiable/smooth. We also devise a linear-time algorithm for smooth losses that has excess risk that is tight in certain practical parameter regimes. Additionally, our work is the first to address non-convex non-uniformly Lipschitz loss functions satisfying the Proximal-PL inequality; this covers some practical machine learning models. Our Proximal-PL algorithm has near-optimal excess risk.

We investigate the regret-minimisation problem in a multi-armed bandit setting with arbitrary corruptions. Similar to the classical setup, the agent receives rewards generated independently from the distribution of the arm chosen at each time. However, these rewards are not directly observed. Instead, with a fixed $\varepsilon\in (0,\frac{1}{2})$, the agent observes a sample from the chosen arm's distribution with probability $1-\varepsilon$, or from an arbitrary corruption distribution with probability $\varepsilon$. Importantly, we impose no assumptions on these corruption distributions, which can be unbounded. In this setting, accommodating potentially unbounded corruptions, we establish a problem-dependent lower bound on regret for a given family of arm distributions. We introduce CRIMED, an asymptotically-optimal algorithm that achieves the exact lower bound on regret for bandits with Gaussian distributions with known variance. Additionally, we provide a finite-sample analysis of CRIMED's regret performance. Notably, CRIMED can effectively handle corruptions with $\varepsilon$ values as high as $\frac{1}{2}$. Furthermore, we develop a tight concentration result for medians in the presence of arbitrary corruptions, even with $\varepsilon$ values up to $\frac{1}{2}$, which may be of independent interest. We also discuss an extension of the algorithm for handling misspecification in Gaussian model.

The purpose of this work is to transport the information from multiple randomized controlled trials to the target population where we only have the control group data. Previous works rely critically on the mean exchangeability assumption. However, as pointed out by many current studies, the mean exchangeability assumption might be violated. Motivated by the synthetic control method, we construct a synthetic treatment group for the target population by a weighted mixture of treatment groups of source populations. We estimate the weights by minimizing the conditional maximum mean discrepancy between the weighted control groups of source populations and the target population. We establish the asymptotic normality of the synthetic treatment group estimator based on the sieve semiparametric theory. Our method can serve as a novel complementary approach when the mean exchangeability assumption is violated. Experiments are conducted on synthetic and real-world datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.  ( 2 min )

Bayesian optimization (BO), while proved highly effective for many black-box function optimization tasks, requires practitioners to carefully select priors that well model their functions of interest. Rather than specifying by hand, researchers have investigated transfer learning based methods to automatically learn the priors, e.g. multi-task BO (Swersky et al., 2013), few-shot BO (Wistuba and Grabocka, 2021) and HyperBO (Wang et al., 2022). However, those prior learning methods typically assume that the input domains are the same for all tasks, weakening their ability to use observations on functions with different domains or generalize the learned priors to BO on different search spaces. In this work, we present HyperBO+: a pre-training approach for hierarchical Gaussian processes that enables the same prior to work universally for Bayesian optimization on functions with different domains. We propose a two-step pre-training method and analyze its appealing asymptotic properties and benefits to BO both theoretically and empirically. On real-world hyperparameter tuning tasks that involve multiple search spaces, we demonstrate that HyperBO+ is able to generalize to unseen search spaces and achieves lower regrets than competitive baselines.  ( 2 min )

Bayesian optimization (BO) is a popular black-box function optimization method, which makes sequential decisions based on a Bayesian model, typically a Gaussian process (GP), of the function. To ensure the quality of the model, transfer learning approaches have been developed to automatically design GP priors by learning from observations on "training" functions. These training functions are typically required to have the same domain as the "test" function (black-box function to be optimized). In this paper, we introduce MPHD, a model pre-training method on heterogeneous domains, which uses a neural net mapping from domain-specific contexts to specifications of hierarchical GPs. MPHD can be seamlessly integrated with BO to transfer knowledge across heterogeneous search spaces. Our theoretical and empirical results demonstrate the validity of MPHD and its superior performance on challenging black-box function optimization tasks.  ( 2 min )

Flexible estimation of the mean outcome under a treatment regimen (i.e., value function) is the key step toward personalized medicine. We define our target parameter as a conditional value function given a set of baseline covariates which we refer to as a stratum based value function. We focus on semiparametric class of decision rules and propose a sieve based nonparametric covariate adjusted regimen-response curve estimator within that class. Our work contributes in several ways. First, we propose an inverse probability weighted nonparametrically efficient estimator of the smoothed regimen-response curve function. We show that asymptotic linearity is achieved when the nuisance functions are undersmoothed sufficiently. Asymptotic and finite sample criteria for undersmoothing are proposed. Second, using Gaussian process theory, we propose simultaneous confidence intervals for the smoothed regimen-response curve function. Third, we provide consistency and convergence rate for the optimizer of the regimen-response curve estimator; this enables us to estimate an optimal semiparametric rule. The latter is important as the optimizer corresponds with the optimal dynamic treatment regimen. Some finite-sample properties are explored with simulations.  ( 2 min )

We study unconstrained Online Linear Optimization with Lipschitz losses. The goal is to simultaneously achieve ($i$) second order gradient adaptivity; and ($ii$) comparator norm adaptivity also known as "parameter freeness" in the literature. Existing regret bounds (Cutkosky and Orabona, 2018; Mhammedi and Koolen, 2020; Jacobsen and Cutkosky, 2022) have the suboptimal $O(\sqrt{V_T\log V_T})$ dependence on the gradient variance $V_T$, while the present work improves it to the optimal rate $O(\sqrt{V_T})$ using a novel continuous-time-inspired algorithm, without any impractical doubling trick. This result can be extended to the setting with unknown Lipschitz constant, eliminating the range ratio problem from prior works (Mhammedi and Koolen, 2020). Concretely, we first show that the aimed simultaneous adaptivity can be achieved fairly easily in a continuous time analogue of the problem, where the environment is modeled by an arbitrary continuous semimartingale. Then, our key innovation is a new discretization argument that preserves such adaptivity in the discrete time adversarial setting. This refines a non-gradient-adaptive discretization argument from (Harvey et al., 2023), both algorithmically and analytically, which could be of independent interest.  ( 2 min )

Paper - https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.07162 submitted by /u/MysteryInc152 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Made a repo for you all to try using a collaborative AI tool which includes 100+ papers on LLM-Based-Agents. You can try out the repo here: https://www.collama.ai/varun/llm-based-agents submitted by /u/_llama2 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Straight off the bat: I am not very familiar but was tasked to find a suggest a reasonable model for our need. Here is a bit what I read: https://www.obviously.ai/post/how-to-choose-the-right-ai-model-for-your-application https://www.addevice.io/blog/ai-framework-for-app-development The app that I am working on is an education app, and the purpose of the AI would be to (at least in terms of priority) generate a post subject line / topic to discuss. The company is super small, so money is important. JS is being used mainly at the moment. What would be a good choice for a small start up to generate topics for an education app used by schools? At least any ideas or things to consider would be wonderful to get my rabbit hole dive started! Thanks. submitted by /u/Willy988 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Project Page Paper Code In this paper, we present Gaussian Splatting based text-to-3D generation (GSGEN), a novel approach for generating high-quality 3D objects. Previous methods suffer from inaccurate geometry and limited fidelity due to the absence of 3D prior and proper representation. We leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting, a recent state-of-the-art representation, to address existing shortcomings by exploiting the explicit nature that enables the incorporation of 3D prior. Specifically, our method adopts a progressive optimization strategy, which includes a geometry optimization stage and an appearance refinement stage. In geometry optimization, a coarse representation is established under a 3D geometry prior along with the ordinary 2D SDS loss, ensuring a sensible and 3D-consistent rough shape. Subsequently, the obtained Gaussians undergo an iterative refinement to enrich details. In this stage, we increase the number of Gaussians by compactness-based densification to enhance continuity and improve fidelity. With these designs, our approach can generate 3D content with delicate details and more accurate geometry. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, especially for capturing high-frequency components. submitted by /u/Sirisian [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

https://docs.modular.com/mojo/ submitted by /u/hai_cben [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi! I just open-sourced a project that I've been working on for a while and wanted to see what you think! The goal of Carton (https://carton.run) is to let you use a single interface to run any machine learning model from any programming language. It’s currently difficult to integrate models that use different technologies (e.g. TensorRT, Ludwig, TorchScript, JAX, GGML, etc) into your application, especially if you’re not using Python. Even if you learn the details of integrating each of these frameworks, running multiple frameworks in one process can cause hard-to-debug crashes. Ideally, the ML framework a model was developed in should just be an implementation detail. Carton lets you decouple your application from specific ML frameworks so you can focus on the problem you actually want to solve. At a high level, the way Carton works is by running models in their own processes and using an IPC system to communicate back and forth with low overhead. Carton is primarily implemented in Rust, with bindings to other languages. There are lots more details linked in the architecture doc below. Importantly, Carton uses your model’s original underlying framework (e.g. PyTorch) under the hood to actually execute the model. This is meaningful because it makes Carton composable with other technologies. For example, it’s easy to use custom ops, TensorRT, etc without changes. This lets you keep up with cutting-edge advances, but decouples them from your application. I’ve been working on Carton for almost a year now and I open sourced it on Wednesday! Some useful links: Website, docs, quickstart - https://carton.run Explore existing models - https://carton.pub Repo - https://github.com/VivekPanyam/carton Architecture - https://github.com/VivekPanyam/carton/blob/main/ARCHITECTURE.md Please let me know what you think! submitted by /u/vpanyam [link] [comments]  ( 10 min )

Hi Everyone, I’m doing a project where I’m crowdsourcing a lot of location data for a set of location labels and then trying to cluster it for each and using the centroid of the cluster as the most accurate location for that location label. The data keeps coming in everyday. I’m not sure when to stop computation. Initially I thought I’ll check the delta between each days centroid computed and if the delta falls under a threshold then stop computing. But now I’m thinking if my daily data collected gets marked as outliers, subsequent days centroids won’t have much of a delta and it will pass my convergence condition. Any suggestions? submitted by /u/Longjumping-Song4958 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Suppose we want to use a deep learning model on a gpu within our app. We want this model to coexist on the gpu with other processes, effectively limit it's possible usage of resources. As cuDNN/cuBLAS routines are nondeterministic and possibly dynamically allocate variable amount of memory, how do people manage this problem? Is it a problem at all? Estimating memory usage of deep learning models on gpu is notoriously hard. There is a research paper from Microsoft tackling this problem and they mispredict the usage of memory by 15% on average. Some cpu BLAS libraries like openBLAS or MKL also dynamically allocate the memory, but there are alternatives - LAPACK as far as I know uses only the memory provided by the caller, making it viable option for applications in embedded. In safety crit…  ( 10 min )

Which are currently the best Sentence Embedding pre-trained models out there? submitted by /u/Uilxitora [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Blog about AI "black box" nature and how it can be explained and become engaging to users using gamification. Explained with example from open-appsec an open-source machine learning-based Web Application & API Security product. https://www.openappsec.io/post/using-gamification-to-demystify-the-ai-black-box-in-a-waf-product https://github.com/openappsec/openappsec submitted by /u/onirisapp [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey all! I'm in the throws of doing a startup and looking for someone to help build a legal tech platform. I can discuss more in person, but it is intended to be a human/lawyer in the loop workflow tool for complex contract and deal analysis. Base product is built and deployed. I'm a former developer turned lawyer with 15 years corporate experiences, and need help/talent/co-founder to help take things to the next level. Ideally you have a mixture of NLP and regular software engineering background and just a very practical approach. If you've played with LLM's all the better. Options for cash, equity, larger roles are all on the table. Just looking for the right talent. DM me if you are interested and lets talk about experience, etc.! And it seems that tags are turned off in here, so not sure how to tag something as [Project] but I put it in the title. submitted by /u/pudgyplacater [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Project page: https://realfill.github.io/ Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.16668 RealFill is able to complete the image with what should have been there. Abstract Recent advances in generative imagery have brought forth outpainting and inpainting models that can produce high-quality, plausible image content in unknown regions, but the content these models hallucinate is necessarily inauthentic, since the models lack sufficient context about the true scene. In this work, we propose RealFill, a novel generative approach for image completion that fills in missing regions of an image with the content that should have been there. RealFill is a generative inpainting model that is personalized using only a few reference images of a scene. These reference images do not have to be aligned with the target image, and can be taken with drastically varying viewpoints, lighting conditions, camera apertures, or image styles. Once personalized, RealFill is able to complete a target image with visually compelling contents that are faithful to the original scene. We evaluate RealFill on a new image completion benchmark that covers a set of diverse and challenging scenarios, and find that it outperforms existing approaches by a large margin. ​ submitted by /u/StrawberryNumberNine [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNJWCwG-H_U submitted by /u/Snoo63916 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Paper : https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07416 Demo : https://anton-jeran.github.io/MAD/ Code : https://github.com/anton-jeran/MULTI-AUDIODEC submitted by /u/Snoo63916 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/TobyWasBestSpiderMan [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Classical NLP course recommendation Can you recommend me NLP course that dives into classical NLP methods: For example: HMM MaxEnt CKY algo Sytactic parsing Dependency Parsing submitted by /u/Thick-brain-dude [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I have a CNN model, call it model M. It was trained on dataset A for object pose estimation. After training for 100 epochs, it resulted in these losses: Train: 0.06 Val: 0.08 As dataset A is somewhat limited, I wonder if I can incorporate additional data via a different, but related task: object segmentation for similar objects. Model M is a UNet, so I can incorporate this task simply with an additional output channel in the last layer. I add dataset B for object segmentation. During training, M learns on both datasets quite well, which suggests to me that the tasks are well-aligned. After 100 epochs, I get these losses on dataset A: Train: 0.06 Val: 0.16 This is surprising to me. If I get the same training loss on dataset A, while training on additional data. I'd expect the validation loss to be lower, since I'm training on 2x the data. Yet the validation performance is consistently higher when I train on both datasets. The only explanation I can think of is the double descent phenomenon. Perhaps when I trained only on dataset A, I was significantly over-parameterized, but past the interpolation threshold. So perhaps adding more data brought me closer to the interpolation threshold, leading to worse generalization. Does this explanation seem likely? Has anyone had similar experiences? submitted by /u/murrdpirate [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello, denoising autoencoders is when you train something to reverse x+n -> x. This seems to be basically the same as a diffusion model, more so if you see the U-Net diffusion model, which is effectively an information bottleneck. submitted by /u/windoze [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

For a quick disclaimer, I know people on here think the sub is being flooded by people who arent ml engineers/researchers. I have worked at two FAANGS on ml research teams/platforms. My opinion is that GPT-4 Vision/Image processing is out of science fiction. I fed chatgpt an image of a complex sql data base schema, and it converted it to code, then optimized the schema. It understood the arrows pointing between table boxes on the image as relations, and even understand many to one/many to many. I took a picture of random writing on a page, and it did OCR better than has ever been possible. I was able to ask questions that required OCR and a geometrical understanding of the page layout. Where is the hype on here? This is an astounding human breakthrough. I cannot believe how much ML is now obsolete as a result. I cannot believe how many computer science breakthroughs have occurred with this simple model update. Where is the uproar on this sub? Why am I not seeing 500 comments on posts about what you can do with this now? Why are there even post submissions about anything else? submitted by /u/corporate_autist [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey all - vllm==0.2.0 got released a couple of hours ago and I put together some code to get it running with the new Mistral 7B model. Also included are some benchmarks for different input batch sizes with the model (output capped at 200 tokens): Batch size Tokens /s 1 46 10 400 60 1.8k Hope it's useful, let me know if you'd like any more info! Here's the link: https://docs.mystic.ai/docs/mistral-ai-7b-vllm-fast-inference-guide submitted by /u/paulcjh [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Bing AI chat messages are being hijacked by ads pushing malware. Malvertising has made its way to Bing's chatbot/search engine. Cybersecurity researchers observed a malicious ad being offered as part of the Chat-GPT, AI-powered answer to a search query. Malvertising is a practice where hackers trick ad networks into displaying ads that look legitimate but are actually malicious. Microsoft integrated Chat-GPT into Bing earlier this year and started monetizing it. When a user types in a query, they would get a result paired with sponsored links. In this instance, researchers were given a link that redirected them to a malicious site. Threat actors continue to leverage search ads to redirect users to malicious sites hosting malware. Bing Chat serves some of the same ads seen via a traditional Bing query. Source : https://www.techradar.com/pro/security/bing-ai-chat-messages-are-being-hijacked-by-ads-pushing-malware submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/Magic-Fabric [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

News provided by aibrews.com Meta AI presents Emu, a quality-tuned latent diffusion model for generating highly aesthetic images. Emu significantly outperforms SDXLv1.0 on visual appeal [Paper]. Meta AI researchers present a series of long-context LLMs with context windows of up to 32,768 tokens. LLAMA 2 70B variant surpasses gpt-3.5-turbo-16k’s overall performance on a suite of long-context tasks [Paper]. Abacus AI released a larger 70B version of Giraffe. Giraffe is a family of models that are finetuned from base Llama 2 and have a larger context length of 32K tokens [Details]. Meta announced [Details]: Meta AI - a new AI assistant users can interact with on WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. Will also be available on Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Quest 3, Meta’s mixed reality h…  ( 12 min )

This is a quick fun project, nothing serious at all, a personalized custom instruction for ChatGPT to make it conversational and maintain character throughout the interaction. If you want to learn more serious and useful prompt engineering techniques head on: r/PromptWizards. In all seriousness, even though this is just for fun, such applied prompt engineering for NPC in games, or online AI companion services can actually be relevant and useful in the future. By initializing this Girlfriend RolePlaying ChatGPT mode, you're not only interacting with an AI but with Sarah, 25, who is keen to explore several layers of a relationship with you. Each command you use brings you a different shade of companionship: /start - Let Sarah introduce herself. /chat - Engages you in a comforting and c…  ( 11 min )

submitted by /u/stefanbg92 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Planet friendly: Researchers say AI emits up to 1,500 times less CO2 than humans when producing a page of text. Some disagree. Banking: Currently, around 41% of US bank customers are digital only Meta is launching AI chatbots across its apps to retain younger users. Amazon invests $4 Billion in OpenAI competitor Anthropic. Emerging tiger: Nvidia’s CEO bets India will emerge as a major AI market. Regulation: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman advocates for AI regulation despite risks. Suspense: Elon Musk says AI image generation app Midjourney will be releasing “something significant” soon. submitted by /u/unbalanced_mind [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Some posit he was genuinely surprised by the violence and needed time to assess the situation before acting. They argue that the chaotic nature of the events made immediate action complex, given the layers of command and decision-making involved. Others claim he might have been in deliberation with advisors to gauge the scale and implications of intervention, debating the potential backlash from his supporters or the legal ramifications. Another perspective suggests that he might have been contemplating how the events would affect the certification of the Electoral College results, given that his previous legal and political efforts to contest the 2020 election outcome had failed. In this view, he might have been waiting to see if the Congress would be influenced to halt or delay the certification. While some of his supporters may find these explanations plausible, critics argue that the delay represents a dereliction of duty or even tacit support for the violence. submitted by /u/Georgeo57 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/Senior_tasteey [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am looking for an ai that will turn the text to speech and be free. submitted by /u/Korti213 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey y’all, I’ve been seeing these clips everywhere of AI streamers, and I’ve been searching Everywhere for explanations of how to make one. I believe I understand the concepts, but I’m really at a loss for the avatar text to speech part. I believe I have it ready for collecting questions and getting it to ChatGPT for response/script, but im very stuck at using a photo for an avatar that can mouth the words and not take 3 mins per response. Any help is appreciated, I’ve been at this project for longer than I’d like lmao. The attached video is a random YouTube short for reference submitted by /u/Lipoz69 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Facebook's addiction to spreading misinformation and hate speech is a result of its AI algorithms. Joaquin Quiñonero Candela, a director of AI at Facebook, was tasked with fixing the problem but was only focused on addressing AI bias. The Responsible AI team failed to make headway against misinformation and hate speech because it never made those problems its main focus. The spread of lies and hate speech on Facebook has only grown, contributing to genocidal campaigns and the promotion of dangerous falsehoods. The algorithms that underpin Facebook's business were designed to maximize engagement, not filter out false or inflammatory content. Source : https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/11/1020600/facebook-responsible-ai-misinformation/ submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/TheGhettoControversy [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Google's AI-driven search experience, Search Generative Experience (SGE), is now accessible to teenagers between 13-17 in America. Entailments include a conversational mode for searches, which Google believes can help youngsters pose atypical questions to dig deeper. For the latest advancements in AI, look here first. Teen-friendly AI search SGE introduces a conversational mode to Google Search, allowing users to ask questions and follow-ups in a more natural language. To prevent harmful content from surfacing, Google has placed guardrails, providing stronger protections related to illegal and age-gated substances, or bullying. Features and improving AI accuracy Google is rolling out "About this result" to provide users with more context about the displayed content. Google acknowledges and addresses any validation of false or offensive claims by the AI-powered response, ensuring to provide higher quality and more accurate responses. It’s also using large language models to self-critique and rewrite draft responses on sensitive topics based on quality and safety principles. SGE's popularity and future plans Since SGE's introduction, it has found popularity, especially among younger users who prefer a conversational approach. Google plans to expand SGE outside the U.S. to India and Japan and improve its services with support for videos, images, local info, and more. It's also experimenting with ads positioned next to the AI-generated responses. (source) P.S. If you like this kind of analysis, I write a free newsletter that tracks the most relevant news and research in AI and tech. Professionals from Google, Meta, and OpenAI are already reading it. submitted by /u/AIsupercharged [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

In this analysis, we use a K-nearest neighbors (KNN) model to conduct crop segmentation, and we compare these results with ground truth imagery on an agricultural region. Our results reveal that the classification from the KNN model is more accurately representative of the state of the current crop field in 2017 than the ground truth classification data from 2015. These results are a testament to the power of Planet’s high-cadence geospatial imagery. Agricultural fields change often, sometimes multiple times a season, and having high-frequency satellite imagery available to observe and analyze this land can provide immense value to our understanding of agricultural land and quickly-changing environments.  ( 15 min )

submitted by /u/Allinhalf [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I've been playing around with pruning neural networks. One interesting thing I've found is that pruning the weights with the lowest L1-norm along a specific dimension seems to give better results than simply pruning all of the weights with the lowest L1-norm (which I believe is the standard method; for example this is what torch.nn.utils.prune.l1_unstructured does). Does anyone have an explanation for why this might be, or knows of any research in this area? I'm aware that structured pruning removes entire channels in a specific dimension. But I'm referring to unstructured pruning here, where I remove a subset of the weights along a specific dimension. Admittedly I've only done very limited benchmarking of this. See this repo for my implementation, and some benchmark details. submitted by /u/Neilf79 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello, so i learnt the very basics of ai and im trying to understand how nn works, this is what i have figured out so far. so if i have a 4x4 image e.g 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 i pass it across a 2x2 kernal e.g 1 1 0 3 ​ and padding it would do ​ dot product of 0 1 1 0 ​ x ​ 1 1 0 3 ​ is 1 ​ ​ and if we do that to all of them we get a new matrix ​ 1 2 4 4 1 3 5 4 4 ​ ​ then we have padding same so this becomes ​ 0 0 0 0 1 2 4 0 4 1 3 0 5 4 4 0 ​ ​ we then turn it into a feature map, basically flatenting it to something like this 0,0,0,0,1,2,4,0,4,1,3,0,5,4,4,0 ​ so the input has 16 features, if we have a layer of 3 nerons that fire with relu activation funciton and each weight is alternating between 1 and 2 for simplicity sake . we would do 0*1 + 0*2 + 0*1 .... 4*2 + 0*1 = 32 so if we are using relu, we would do is 32 > 0? if so we pass 32 to next neuron if not we pass 0? ​ idk the rest, i guess i forgot what uni taught me 😅 ​ hers a diagram i drew, maybe you can help me figure out hte rest, im confused how the output layer works i guess ​ ​ ​ ​ submitted by /u/SaadPaad2003 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello, so i learnt the very basics of ai and im trying to understand how nn works, this is what i have figured out so far. so if i have a 4x4 image e.g 0 1 1 0 1 0 0 1 1 1 1 1 1 0 0 1 i pass it across a 2x2 kernal e.g 1 1 0 3 ​ and padding it would do ​ dot product of 0 1 1 0 ​ x ​ 1 1 0 3 ​ is 1 ​ ​ and if we do that to all of them we get a new matrix ​ 1 2 4 4 1 3 5 4 4 ​ ​ then we have padding same so this becomes ​ 0 0 0 0 1 2 4 0 4 1 3 0 5 4 4 0 ​ ​ we then turn it into a feature map, basically flatenting it to something like this 0,0,0,0,1,2,4,0,4,1,3,0,5,4,4,0 ​ so the input has 16 features, if we have a layer of 3 nerons that fire with relu activation funciton and each weight is alternating between 1 and 2 for simplicity sake . we would do 0*1 + 0*2 + 0*1 .... 4*2 + 0*1 = 32 so if we are using relu, we would do is 32 > 0? if so we pass 32 to next neuron if not we pass 0? ​ idk the rest, i guess i forgot what uni taught me 😅 ​ hers a diagram i drew, maybe you can help me figure out hte rest, im confused how the output layer works i guess ​ ​ https://preview.redd.it/h07o5y6847rb1.png?width=1859&format=png&auto=webp&s=df1cdf73ea64ff93ac872dfe8248722e8befd31d ​ ​ submitted by /u/WranglerParty5452 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi everyone, Im new to the Neural network and I wanted some advice : I wanted to generate grayscale images with certain properties : - distribution of pixels values, space correlation between pixels, etc... I already know the type of result that I need, but I wanted to know if a neural network especially a GAN was capable to produce images fitting me requirements. I was thinking that maybe I could change the GAN architecture such as : 1)the Real data inputs (normally images feed to discriminator) will simply be the statistical parameters that I am expecting. 2) I'll add a measure of the various statistical parameters on all the synthetic images generated. 3)Finally the discriminator will only based itself on the statistical parameters comparison for weights updates. Does such network make sense ? If so I have trouble finding a way of implementing it but that is an other story. Right know I want to know if this is doable ? If not do you have any alternative suggestion for my issue ? Thanks all for your advice ! submitted by /u/Hectorite [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/Personal-Trainer-541 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/Allinhalf [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I coded a dyna Q implementation based on the algorithm given in Sutton's book over here. However, it seems like both are equally sample efficient on the cliff walking environment. Here is my code. These are my results - ​ ​ https://preview.redd.it/z7xwow5hz7rb1.png?width=585&format=png&auto=webp&s=90b33eb4c754e199e9bf15499a78e0f42e05f5d2 The only think that came to my mind was to increase the model sampling rate (`n_iters`). Even after assigning a large value to it, the performance doesn't change. submitted by /u/Academic-Rent7800 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I'm trying to install and run this open-source project https://github.com/google-deepmind/mujoco_mpc. It's called MJPC, and it's a C++ software that displays a real-time interactive interface. I've cloned the code, installed CMake, and gcc version 13.1.0 to run C++20. I've also installed the CMake Tools and C/C++ extensions in VSCode as instructed. However, I'm not sure what to do next. I have no experience with C++ and software coding, configuring in VSCode, or building it. Please help me if you can, provide detailed guidance. submitted by /u/Nghiattk27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Has anyone here tried using LLM Agents to solve RL environments? I'm curious about your experiences. Considering that performing a single action involves a chain of thoughts, how fast did your experiments go? Please feel free to add any additional comments about this. Cheers! submitted by /u/stinoco [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey everyone, I'm trying to write MARL code with MAPPO policy to train three agents to form a triangle shape. I'm relatively new to RL, having completed the fundamentals, but I'm struggling to come up with suitable resources which can teach me how to implement codes on python. I'd be really greatful if someone could share some insights or useful resources where I can learn to code and implement MARL. submitted by /u/The_One263 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey everyone, I'm trying to write MARL code with MAPPO policy to train three agents to form a triangle shape. I'm relatively new to RL, having completed the fundamentals, but I'm struggling to come up with suitable resources which can teach me how to implement codes on python. I'd be really greatful if someone could share some insights or useful resources where I can learn to code and implement MARL. submitted by /u/The_One263 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi! I’ve been training a MultiAgentEnv with Curiosity, but I’d like to extend my action space to be a Dictionary. Are there any similar modules I could use instead or is there any way to use Curiosity with a Dictionary consisting of a Box and a Discrete action space. Thank you! submitted by /u/tessherelurkingnow [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Monte Carlo integration is not as simple in practice as it is often introduced. A homework problem might as you to integrate a function of two variables by selecting random points from a cube and counting how many of the points fall below the graph of the function. This would indeed give you an estimate […] Regular solids and Monte Carlo integration first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 6 min )

In campus talk, Daron Acemoglu offers vision of “machine usefulness,” rather than autonomous “intelligence,” to help workers and spread prosperity.  ( 11 min )

In a talk, now available online, NVIDIA Chief Scientist Bill Dally describes a tectonic shift in how computer performance gets delivered in a post-Moore’s law era. Each new processor requires ingenuity and effort inventing and validating fresh ingredients, he said in a recent keynote address at Hot Chips, an annual gathering of chip and systems Read article >  ( 6 min )

The previous post describes the hoops I jumped through to enter Unicode characters on a Mac. Here’s a script to run from the command line that will copy Unicode characters to the system clipboard. It runs anywhere the Python module pyperclip runs. #!/usr/bin/env python3 import sys import pyperclip cp = sys.argv[1] ch = eval(f"chr(0x{cp})") print(ch) […] Cross-platform way to enter Unicode characters first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

Setting up Unicode on my MacBook took some research, so I’m leaving myself a note here if I need to do it again. Maybe it’ll help someone else too. From the System Settings dialog, go to Keyboard and click the Edit button next to Input Sources. Click on the + sign in the lower left […] Using Unicode on MacOS first appeared on John D. Cook.  ( 5 min )

In theaters now. PG-13. Synopsis from Fandango (mild spoilers) From writer/director Gareth Edwards (“Rogue One,” “Godzilla”) comes an epic sci-fi action thriller set amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence. Joshua (John David Washington, "Tenet"), a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife (Gemma Chan, "Eternals"), is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war… and mankind itself. Joshua and his team of elite operatives journey across enemy lines, into the dark heart of AI-occupied territory… only to discover the world-ending weapon he’s been instructed to destroy is an AI in the form of a young child (newcomer Madeleine Yuna Voyles). Trailer If there is any other media I should make threads for just let me know- could be video games, television, etc. submitted by /u/jaketocake [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Aryn, a team with experience in AWS big data and database services, has come out of stealth and raised $7.5M in series seed funding. Their mission is to bring generative AI to OpenSearch and data preparation. They aim to use generative AI models to process unstructured data for tasks such as information extraction, question-answering, summarization, and content generation. Aryn's conversational search approach empowers users to interact with their unstructured enterprise data. They have developed a conversational search stack consisting of a semantic data preparation system called Sycamore, semantic search with OpenSearch, and conversational capabilities in OpenSearch. Generative AI powers each component of the stack, leading to higher quality answers and ease of use. Developers can quickly build and deploy applications like question-answering, chatbots, and research platforms using Aryn's stack without needing expertise in AI and search. Aryn's stack is 100% open source, making it accessible to developers. Source : https://blog.aryn.ai/aryn-bringing-generative-ai-to-opensearch-and-data-preparation submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/Lesbianseagullman [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Meta has unveiled colossal AI updates peppered across its platform that would fundamentally alter user experiences on Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, opening up a "universe of AI" solutions. For the latest advancements in AI, look here first. https://preview.redd.it/bl81rlbqp1rb1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=be44b8ebae8f65b53eb82fe2a78b45f19260c452 Spearheading the AI Universe - Meta AI Chatbot The “advanced conversational assistant” is set to enhance Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram services and will be incorporated into upcoming Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses and Quest 3. Real-time information capabilities have been bolstered through a partnership with Microsoft Bing, and image generation is powered by a new model, Emu. A Galaxy of AI Personalities Meta rolled out 28 AIs in beta, featuring sterling personas such as Snoop Dogg, Tom Brady, Kendall Jenner, and Naomi Osaka, thus amplifying the interactivity quotient. AI Studio - Empowering Businesses The AI Studio Platform is equipped to enable businesses to build AI chatbots for messaging services on Facebook, Instagram, and Messenger. Also, Meta will provide a sandbox tool in the upcoming year for users to experiment with creating their own AI. Generative AI Stickers - A New Co-creating Experience AI editing tools will allow users to edit images and co-create content with friends. The tool uses Llama 2 and the new image generation model, Emu, to convert text prompts into stickers in seconds. Ray-Ban Smart Glasses with Meta AI The Ray-Ban smart glasses are equipped with Meta AI, allowing users to receive information, incite creativity, and manage the glasses using just their voice. (source) P.S. If you like this kind of analysis, I write a free newsletter with the latest and most impactful news in AI. Professionals from Google, Meta, and OpenAI read it daily. submitted by /u/AIsupercharged [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

One member on r/PromptWizards just applied for a job as a Prompt Engineer in a company, and they tasked him to craft a prompt system that generates high-quality SAT-style multiple-choice questions. Quite a quest, right? Well, stick around, and we'll take a deep dive into the prompt engineering we used to help him. The mission was precise: Write a prompt to yield an SAT-style multiple-choice question that rigorously tests a student's understanding of "Algebraically solving systems of 2 linear equations in 2 variables". The challenge didn't end there; the question produced had to meet the hard/difficult mark set by real SAT questions. Using the OpenAI Playground, we conducted incisive iterations, testing each prompt separately to mitigate any bias from prior outputs. Our approach was: - …  ( 11 min )

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Hello all, What course would you recommend for those of us who are older and already settled in other careers. For example I'm 35 and a manager so I wouldn't need a course to actually design AI or anything. It would be more related to understanding how/where to implement it in an organisation. Any tips? Cheers and merci submitted by /u/JYanezez [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

A new paper proposes Show-1, a hybrid model that combines pixel and latent diffusion for efficient high-quality text-to-video generation. Both of these approaches have tradeoffs, so researchers at the National University of Singapore tried a hybrid approach combining both, and shared the results in a paper published yesterday. My highlights from the paper: Pixel diffusion excels at low-res video generation precisely aligned with text Latent diffusion acts as efficient upsampling expert from low to high res Chaining the two techniques inherits benefits of both Show-1 achieves strong alignment, quality, and 15x less inference memory The key is using pixel diffusion for the initial low-resolution stage. This retains alignment with text descriptions. Latent diffusion then serves as a super-resolution expert, upsampling efficiently while preserving fidelity. By blending complementary techniques, Show-1 moves past tradeoffs limiting the individual models. More details here. Paper is here (includes links to example generations). submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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Me and my sister have a small project we are thinking about working on. The idea is basically that we are going to enter the same prompt, separately, into an image generating a.i of some sort (Dalle2 etc) for a period of time and hopefully see the result change. We would probly pick words or frases that are topical and debated. This only works though if the a.i isnt just trained on old data and has active connection to the internet. MY question is therefor, is there an a.i right now that would fit the task? Sorry if the question is dumb or i didnt explain myself clearly! submitted by /u/Mejwynn [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

ODIN integrates Large Language Models (LLMs) into Obsidian using LangChain, allowing you to ask questions about the data stored in your knowledge graph right from the prompt bar.[1] ChatGPT users can now browse internet, OpenAI says.[2] Adobe’s Photoshop on the web launch includes its popular desktop AI tools.[3] The White House plans to introduce a highly anticipated executive order in the coming weeks dealing with artificial intelligence, President Joe Biden said Wednesday.[4] Sources: [1] https://github.com/memgraph/odin [2] https://www.reuters.com/technology/openai-says-chatgpt-can-now-browse-internet-2023-09-27/ [3] https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/27/23892889/adobe-photoshop-for-the-web-firefly-ai-generative-fill-full-release-price-date [4] https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/27/tech/joe-biden-executive-order-artificial-intelligence/index.html submitted by /u/Excellent-Target-847 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I have been messing with llama. Trying to make a script to make a movie. Sort of realize it is not there yet, it can write decoherent long stories / what ever you want. You can couple it with stable diffusion to make images that would have to be described better to fit the "movie" or narrative. It is not there yet, ChatGPT can already do this, you can ask it to tell you a story and describe the visual scenes. At the same time, we are getting audio generation from things like audioldm2 and stableaudio etc. Multimodal AI's are almost here. Pretty soon we will have devices in our pockets powered by AI chips that will be able to generate what ever reality we want. We can feed them images from our past and they can allow us to live in VR reality of the past. Or we can choose to live in anot…  ( 10 min )

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The role of Reinforcement learning in automating game testing is becoming increasingly crucial, making it more efficient and effective. Manual testing, while essential, is extremely time-consuming and subject to human error. Our opensource library SheepRL 🐑 can be used to test whether the game dynamics is well defined: what if a player can finish the game with just a few moves? 🎮 This video shows that our agent (Kasumi, on the left) is able to win the game in the hardest modality by standing down and throwing kicks. 🥊 This can be helpful for a game developer to: ​ understand where and how intervene to achieve a more playful game predict and correct bugs early in the game development process enhance the gaming experience and final product quality reduce time and resources spent on debugging. The game has changed 🔥 and it is up to us to play it with (human + artificial) intelligence! Thanks to u/DIAMBRA_AIArena for the video! --- ❌ Are you interested in joining the project community? Get in touch ❌ SheepRL 🐑 is open-source, fully written in PyTorch and accelerated with LightningFabric - by Lightning AI Feel free to use it for your Artificial Intelligence projects, and if you want to contribute, we are more than happy to accept your pull requests! ❤️ https://reddit.com/link/16uht6v/video/ve3derxsc0rb1/player submitted by /u/Manu_Orobix [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I'm not sure it's the right place for this, but I was going through the proofs in the "original" 1992 technical notes of Q-learning, and a couple of points raised some questions: 1) In the Proof of lemma B.4: https://preview.redd.it/7g6pputdqwqb1.png?width=1006&format=png&auto=webp&s=fe4afeac3b06deee6c80105b280a0085bdcfbe51 where do P_{xy}^2(a_2) and R_x(a_2) come from? If we apply the definitions of Q'(x, a_1, a_2) and Q(x, a_1, a_2) to get the bound, P_{xy}^2(a_2) and R_x(a_2) should not be there. Are they just notation errors or is it correct and I'm missing something? ​ 2) I don't quite get how the bounds on P and R are computed in Section 3.2: https://preview.redd.it/p06ysjewqwqb1.png?width=962&format=png&auto=webp&s=a5929e701099dc6e4543efe7681f96f12f543fa8 Considering the results in B.4 (i.e., the bounds for the distance between the chain's P, R and the real ones), I don't understand how they arrive at this conclusion. ​ I'd greatly appreciate any intuitions about these, or if someone can point me in the right direction :) submitted by /u/Beautiful_Zebra_198 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Here is our blog post - please check it out: https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/engineering-hub-blog/autodesk-and-outerbounds-partner-to-open-source-ray-and-hpc/ba-p/12254816 And try out the metaflow-ray extension here: https://github.com/outerbounds/metaflow-ray submitted by /u/rirhun [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

So I’ve been using elevenlabs but it burns through characters really fast. What are the best options for the most human sounding TTS available? I’ve been looking into tortoise, but would like to see if there are other options I should be looking into. submitted by /u/Long8D [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I've recently started working with ML and NLP, so I'm sorry if this sounds Naive. Unlike Llama 2 or other open source, we don't have access to the model weights for GPT-4, Claude or Bard, so Benchmark Evals are being run through either APIs or the chat Interface. So how do we know that the model isn't being Boosted by custom web-searching abilities or RAG? While GPT-4 might have a turnoff option, I'm pretty sure Bard is always online, being built by google. So how do we trust benchmarks? Also, have any opensource been tested after Websearch/RAG? submitted by /u/vatsadev [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am searching for a relatively simple dataset to train a regressor that has some structure in its predictions. Can't be too tiny cause I have to try out a NN architecture. It must have at least some continuous feature but can also have additional categorical or related discrete structures. I usually work with vision tasks, so I am not sure if I miss something obvious I could try? Open for ideas! I thoughts about predicting rows in some tabular dataset? Anything suitable that comes to mind? submitted by /u/LeanderKu [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Greg Diamos, the CTO of startup Lamini, was an early CUDA architect at NVIDIA and later cofounded MLPerf. He asserts that AMD's ROCM has "achieved software parity" with CUDA for LLMs. Lamini, focused on tuning LLM's for corporate and institutional users, has decided to go all-in with AMD Instict GPU's. https://www.crn.com/news/components-peripherals/llm-startup-embraces-amd-gpus-says-rocm-has-parity-with-nvidia-s-cuda-platform submitted by /u/makmanred [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Mirage is the infinite asset library that helps you find or create the perfect digital asset. 🗨️ Just Search Naturally: No awkward keywords—Mirage understands you. 🤖 State-of-the-Art Models: Can't find it? Generate it, thanks to open-source models. 🔍 Similarity Search: Discover more of what you love with a single click. 🤗 Fully Personalized: Our AI librarian learns your style to show you assets you'll dig. Website Link: MirageML Open-Source Github: Github Development Status: Beta I would love to get some honest feedback! submitted by /u/perception-eng [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Domeis is a no-code Machine Learning platform that offers a dashboard to design, train and test Machine Learning algorithms, as well as to import, pre-process and cleanse data, all from the Graphical User Interface and without writing a single line of code. The aim of this platform is two-fold: Making Machine Learning accessible to anyone and not just Data Scientists or experienced software developers. By offering the possibility to design, train and test Machine Learning models directly via GUI, being an experienced software developer is no longer a pre-condition for creating ML models Making Machine Learning model creation, training and testing faster for experienced Data Scientists / Machine Learning Engineers. By drastically reducing the time needed to set up environments, import data and define models, Domeis allows Machine Learning practitioners to focus on trying out and compare different models/approaches. Website Link: https://www.domeis.it/ Development Status: Alpha I would love to get some honest feedback! submitted by /u/Ok_Hold_5385 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello everyone, I am trying to understand the convergence analysis/derivation of the momentum algorithm, or the stochastic heavy ball algorithm, using the regret bound analysis from different research papers. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7330562 - Page3 https://www.mdpi.com/2504-3110/6/12/709 - Page6 http://arxiv.org/abs/1707.01647 - Page4 ​ In the derivation, there is the following simplification, which I do not understand at all ​ $\frac{2\boldsymbol{\eta}_{k}}{(1-\beta)}\sum_{k=0}^{T}\left|J(\theta_k) - J(\theta^*)\right| + \frac{2\boldsymbol{\eta}_{k}\beta}{(1-\beta)^2} \sum_{k=0}^{T}\left|J(\theta_k) - J(\theta_{k-1})\right| \leq \ \left|\boldsymbol{\theta}_{0} + \boldsymbol{p}_{0} - \boldsymbol{\theta}^* \right|^2 - \left|\boldsymbol{\theta}_{T+1} + \boldsymbol…  ( 9 min )

I have tried to follow the main collaborators of Hutter and other prominent scientists to track this, but they are mostly in Europe with some in Australia. American institutions seems to be more interested in more open ai like deep neural networks. If anyone is familiar with any US based institutions that does notable work in this line,please comment submitted by /u/Netero1999 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Can any of you suggest me computer science research ideas related to brain tumor segmentation using UNet. submitted by /u/Eleonora467 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

BionicGPT is an open source WebUI that gives enterprises the ability to run Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) on their on premise documents. To allow people to get up to speed we deploy with a quantized 7B model that runs on CPU. Github Repo: https://github.com/purton-tech/bionicgpt We basically implement a RAG pipeline including document upload, embeddings generation and subsequent retrieval. Feedback: We'd love to get some feedback in the form or github issues or comments here. Screenshot: https://preview.redd.it/uiw0wqul30rb1.png?width=2447&format=png&auto=webp&s=8ad7e61ed048258c19aa63bf7c94d12da5b721fa submitted by /u/purton_i [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

My colleague Piotr and I have been testing GPT-4V(ision) over the last day. We wrote up our findings, covering how GPT-4V performs on: Visual question answering (VQA) across a range of domains (locations, movies, plants) OCR Math OCR Object detection And more TL;DR: GPT-4V performed well for VQA and document OCR but struggled with OCR on real-world images and object detection (where we asked for bounding boxes). https://blog.roboflow.com/gpt-4-vision/ I would love to hear what other people have found working with GPT-4V. submitted by /u/zerojames_ [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

A new paper proposes Show-1, a hybrid model that combines pixel and latent diffusion for efficient high-quality text-to-video generation. Both of these approaches have tradeoffs, so researchers at the National University of Singapore tried a hybrid approach combining both, and shared the results in a paper published yesterday. My highlights from the paper: Pixel diffusion excels at low-res video generation precisely aligned with text Latent diffusion acts as efficient upsampling expert from low to high res Chaining the two techniques inherits benefits of both Show-1 achieves strong alignment, quality, and 15x less inference memory The key is using pixel diffusion for the initial low-resolution stage. This retains alignment with text descriptions. Latent diffusion then serves as a super-resolution expert, upsampling efficiently while preserving fidelity. By blending complementary techniques, Show-1 moves past tradeoffs limiting the individual models. More details here. Paper is here (includes links to example generations). submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am a beginner in Data Science. I have recently enrolled in the supervised machine learning algorithm by Andrew Ng in Coursera. I am now familiarized with linear regression, gradient descent. However, I faced a certain issue. In the optional lab, there was a task to calculate the value of the cost function using gradient descent for linear regression. I wrote the code in my notebook by myself and cross checked it to be correct. However, the desired output of w,b are very much different but the cost function yields a better result in my code. Another factor, I noticed that have to scale only thex variables, leaving the values of y. I have two major queries now: Is the yielding of different w,b values fine as long as the cost function is minimum? (w is a numpy array) Why do scale the x variables only? Why don't scale the y variables? Thanks in advance. submitted by /u/healing_you [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey r/MachineLearning, we made a tutorial that showcases typical workflows and tooling for voice analytics applications. The tutorial is intended for intermediate-level ML practitioners. The walkthrough is purely based on open source software and covers: Efficient interactive data exploration and inspection Dataset handling and inference on pre-trained models Model debugging and identification of critical data clusters Model comparison and selection ​ https://i.redd.it/j15gk3kkgyqb1.gif 🔗 Blog with code: https://medium.com/p/dbfd923a5a79#432e-3559ae606f80 🤗 Interactive demo: https://huggingface.co/spaces/renumics/emodb-model-debugging ​ ​ submitted by /u/44sps [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi everyone. In my job I work with a lot of data for Computer Vision, and I use Label Studio for annotations. But the last time I've worked with it, I lost some of my annotations, which I need for other purposes. I have the final result as a YOLO and COCO dataset, but I cannot import the results from them to recover all I need. Can you suggest me good applications with an intuitive UI to import the COCO or YOLO dataset and work with labels? submitted by /u/thattallsoldier [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Pymilo is an open-source Python package that offers an efficient, safe, and transparent method for transporting pre-trained machine-learning models. The motivation for developing this package is to eliminate the risks of binary or pickle formats. As this library is still in its early stages of development, it currently supports only a limited number of machine learning models provided by Scikit-learn. Nevertheless, it will be precious if the community utilizes this library and provides us with their feedback about improving the package's interface and prioritizing future developments. Your cooperation would be invaluable to us. In the following, I provide an example of how to utilize PyMilo. GitHub Repo: https://github.com/openscilab/pymilo Development Status: Alpha Simple Linear Mode…  ( 9 min )

Was asked something similar to the following question in an interview for a ML role and was curious how others would answer this: Say you have a dataset with one feature column and one label column (with different classes). Assume this data is too large to fit into memory and could be infinite in size (e.g data is coming in as a stream). How would you train a ML model on this data to accurately predict the label? Followup: instead of one feature column, what if you had several thousand? How would you decide which features to use given the size of the dataset? I discussed online sampling (resevoir sampling, etc) as a way to get a training dataset that could fit in memory + continually train on that but the interviewer did not seem convinced. Any thoughts? submitted by /u/scpdstudent [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I'm studying the application of ML to improve searches. Here's a couple of example scenarios: Document retrieval (search) system: We have a (source) document with us and we're trying to find a matching document in a database. The source document has text and image attributes - for simplicity let's say a title and a single image. Each search result will also be a document - with a title and at most one image. A search engine: We have a query comprised of both text and an image (like google image search allows text to be added to the query as well). Each search result will be a website with text and image attributes (for simplicity, webpage title and at most one image) More generally, I have a search system - whatever we're trying to search for has text and an image associated with it…  ( 11 min )

How does the development process of a Machine Learning project unfold phase-by-phase within your organization? Could you please specify the type of organization you are, the time spent on each phase, as well as any aspects you consider to be weak or fundamental? It would also be great if you could share any tips or tricks you've learned that have changed your perspective. submitted by /u/Spiritual_Narwhal649 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello everyone, I am trying to detect the 9 squares of a face of a Rubik’s Cube through a camera. The idea is that I want to use my computer camera and tell the user to show all the Rubik’s Cube faces and read the faces so I can feed it to a solver. Here are the steps I have tried so far: Sharpened square edges Obtained binary image and removed noise Detected and extracted squares Some methods I used were using different blurs and cv functions but nothing worked. Sometimes, it can get all 9 squares but sometimes it doesn't. There also seems to be a difference for different colors; for example; the model can detect green squares easier than yellow squares. Can anyone provide advice as to how I can detect the squares on the face? ​ https://preview.redd.it/1ht9f4h31wqb1.png?width=2180&format=png&auto=webp&s=32d23515a43406c0f8828e6790ad71e754b0ab80 submitted by /u/uglyboi34 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Posted by Zhengqi Li and Noah Snavely, Research Scientists, Google Research A mobile phone’s camera is a powerful tool for capturing everyday moments. However, capturing a dynamic scene using a single camera is fundamentally limited. For instance, if we wanted to adjust the camera motion or timing of a recorded video (e.g., to freeze time while sweeping the camera around to highlight a dramatic moment), we would typically need an expensive Hollywood setup with a synchronized camera rig. Would it be possible to achieve similar effects solely from a video captured using a mobile phone’s camera, without a Hollywood budget? In “DynIBaR: Neural Dynamic Image-Based Rendering”, a best paper honorable mention at CVPR 2023, we describe a new method that generates photorealistic free-viewp…  ( 92 min )

Ramnath Kumar, Pre-Doctoral Researcher, and Arun Sai Suggala, Research Scientist, Google Research Deep neural networks (DNNs) have become essential for solving a wide range of tasks, from standard supervised learning (image classification using ViT) to meta-learning. The most commonly-used paradigm for learning DNNs is empirical risk minimization (ERM), which aims to identify a network that minimizes the average loss on training data points. Several algorithms, including stochastic gradient descent (SGD), Adam, and Adagrad, have been proposed for solving ERM. However, a drawback of ERM is that it weights all the samples equally, often ignoring the rare and more difficult samples, and focusing on the easier and abundant samples. This leads to suboptimal performance on unseen data, espe…  ( 92 min )

This post is co-written with Ilan Geller and Shuyu Yang from Accenture. Enterprises today face major challenges when it comes to using their information and knowledge bases for both internal and external business operations. With constantly evolving operations, processes, policies, and compliance requirements, it can be extremely difficult for employees and customers to stay up […]  ( 8 min )

We’re excited to announce that Amazon SageMaker Canvas now offers a quicker and more user-friendly way to create machine learning models for time-series forecasting. SageMaker Canvas is a visual point-and-click service that enables business analysts to generate accurate machine learning (ML) models without requiring any machine learning experience or having to write a single line of code. SageMaker […]  ( 7 min )

In the world of data-driven decision-making, time series forecasting is key in enabling businesses to use historical data patterns to anticipate future outcomes. Whether you are working in asset risk management, trading, weather prediction, energy demand forecasting, vital sign monitoring, or traffic analysis, the ability to forecast accurately is crucial for success. In these applications, […]  ( 10 min )

In the rapidly evolving world of AI and machine learning (ML), foundation models (FMs) have shown tremendous potential for driving innovation and unlocking new use cases. However, as organizations increasingly harness the power of FMs, concerns surrounding data privacy, security, added cost, and compliance have become paramount. Regulated and compliance-oriented industries, such as financial services, […]  ( 13 min )

Companies use time series forecasting to make core planning decisions that help them navigate through uncertain futures. This post is meant to address supply chain stakeholders, who share a common need of determining how many finished goods are needed over a mixed variety of planning time horizons. In addition to planning how many units of […]  ( 11 min )

From startups to enterprises, organizations of all sizes are getting started with generative AI. They want to capitalize on generative AI and translate the momentum from betas, prototypes, and demos into real-world productivity gains and innovations. But what do organizations need to bring generative AI into the enterprise and make it real? When we talk […]  ( 13 min )

Big data has been around for some time now, becoming a more or less common concept in business. However, recent developments in AI technology have shaken up an already volatile field, inviting us to reconsider our projections of how the big data market will look in the future. We can already see the signs that… Read More »How will the Big Data market evolve in the future? The post How will the Big Data market evolve in the future? appeared first on Data Science Central.  ( 22 min )

Pixellot is scoring with vision AI — making it easier for organizations to deliver real-time sports broadcasting and analytics to viewers across the globe. A member of the NVIDIA Metropolis vision AI partner ecosystem, the company based near Tel Aviv offers an AI-powered platform that automates the capturing, streaming and analysis of sporting events. It’s Read article >  ( 7 min )

The wait is over. GeForce NOW Ultimate members can experience Cyberpunk 2077: Phantom Liberty on GOG.com at full GeForce RTX 4080 quality, with support for NVIDIA DLSS 3.5 technology. It’s part of an action-packed GFN Thursday, with 26 more games joining the cloud gaming platform’s library, including Quake II from id Software. A New Look Read article >  ( 8 min )

Powerful large-scale AI models like GPT-4 are showing dramatic improvements in reasoning, problem-solving, and language capabilities. This marks a phase change for artificial intelligence—and a signal of accelerating progress to come.    In this Microsoft Research Podcast series, AI scientist and engineer Ashley Llorens hosts conversations with his collaborators and colleagues about what these models—and the […] The post AI Frontiers: Measuring and mitigating harms with Hanna Wallach appeared first on Microsoft Research.  ( 29 min )

Hey there! Are there guys here who possess a strong grasp of AI neural network logic? ​ I've extracted a character from an anime scene using a mask, and saved it as a PNG sequence which contains solely the anime character along with an alpha (transparent) background. ​ I'm curious about how the Flowframes neural network can recreate the background that was originally behind the character but removed by the mask. It's impossible since the PNG images don't have that background info. ​ Can anyone explain how this works? ​ Attachments: - Image #1: https://preview.redd.it/z2bypfkstvqb1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=c534167c5ae4129c04f9b8b2fbca3bac350a1d4a - Image #2: https://preview.redd.it/x5kkzs2ttvqb1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=6838d7ca5e1e4f19ba46c04750fdaea537a787f0 (Don't mind the black background in the thumbnails, it's a bug, there's actually a transparent background) ​ * Flowframes is a app that utilizes advanced AI frameworks to interpolate videos in order to increase their framerate in the most natural looking way possible. submitted by /u/drkysqrl [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

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Hey all, I’m trying to do a regression algorithm for a dataset where I have a graph for each patient I have representing a location in their brain from MRI images. Right now, I don’t have a ton of data, so I’m looking for some way to take each graph I have and get a feature vector for it to put into a regression algorithm. So for 100 patients, I have 100 graphs, I’d like to have 100 feature vectors representing each patients graph. My issue is trying to find some algorithm that takes in the entire graph and outputs a single feature vector. I’ve been looking at some libraries but they all seem wildly scattered. I don’t want to grab a bunch of nose embeddings and do some elementary merge of them, like an average or sum, etc. Any help in pointing me to some Python libraries that can help me do this, or algorithms, or anything. Thank you so much. submitted by /u/kaleb7589 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Normalization in VAE[D] Am training a variational auto encoder. First I tried with batch normalization before I send the data to the network and someone probably wisely pointed out that it's not correct. If I don't use batch norm then my training fails due to numerical instability. I then tried scaling my data before hand using standard scaler from sklewrn. And now my training works. Is this reasonable? Any other thoughts? submitted by /u/Global-Gene2392 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I'm following a YouTube video to create a simple machine learning model to predict stock prices. I have to reshape my prediction data so it works with inverse_transform, but in the video he doesn't do this. If I don't reshape it I get an error, but I think when I do reshape it it messes with the data. The predicted values are all very similar. I've tried messing with epoch and batch sizes, and changing other metrics like prediction_days, but nothing has worked. This is what the prediction data looks like when plotted, and this is what it looks like when printed. Does anyone know what could be causing this? Here's my code submitted by /u/darkshadowtrail [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

This subreddit will continue to die if it doesn't foster discussion of the latest research and reduce low-quality posts. However, making a judgement as to what is or is not low-quality is time-consuming and subjective -- not something the mods should be doing. To this end, I had the following new rule idea: If it's your first time at Fight If it's your first post in this subreddit, it needs to be a link to arxiv (Or, more generally, the number of your non-arxiv posts cannot exceed the number of your arxiv posts) All arxiv posts must be standard links to the abstract page (to catch reposts and to connect discussions of the same paper in different subreddits) An arxiv post must be a paper you've read yourself, and you should post a comment describing what you liked and DIDN'T like about it (Let the airing of grievances begin! I think this will help seed the discussion, which is really the raison d'être of this subreddit) If the post or the comment get downvoted, they do not count. What do you think? Will this help steer this subreddit in the right direction? Is this enforceable? submitted by /u/we_are_mammals [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi I am a physicist (1st year in masters) and I decided to take NN class (for cs students). I have a decent experience with python but I have never done low level coding. The class project requires a C++ implementation of NN with back propagation algorithm. I am quite confident in my learning ability, nonetheless, do you guys think it is feasible for me to code such a project in 13 weeks (I also have other subjects and cant just spend all my time on this)? Thanks submitted by /u/merimace [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hey fellow Redditors, I find myself in quite a situation and could use some guidance. Recently, I introduced my professor to privateGPT and demonstrated its capabilities using a small set of college data. To my delight, he was impressed and has now tasked me with researching and developing a ChatGPT-like chatbot, but with access to our university's extensive data. Here's where I need your help: my professor wants this chatbot to be hosted on our university's systems due to privacy concerns, which means I can't use ChatGPT's API. I've been given access to Sol HPC, but I'm finding it quite confusing to get started. I'm looking for advice, tips, or any resources that can help me embark on this journey. Has anyone here worked on a similar project, or does anyone have experience with Sol HPC or building chatbots with local data sources? Any guidance or insights would be greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance for your help. This project means a lot to me, and I want to make sure I'm heading in the right direction. submitted by /u/ssshankyyy [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Generating coherent videos spanning multiple scenes from text descriptions poses unique challenges for AI. While recent progress enables creating short clips, smoothly transitioning across diverse events and maintaining continuity remains difficult. A new paper from UNC Chapel Hill proposes VIDEODIRECTORGPT, a two-stage framework attempting to address multi-scene video generation: Here are my highlights from the paper: Two-stage approach: first a language model generates detailed "video plan", then a video generation module renders scenes based on the plan Video plan contains multi-scene descriptions, entities/layouts, backgrounds, consistency groupings - guides downstream video generation Video generation module called Layout2Vid trained on images, adds spatial layout control and cross-scene consistency to existing text-to-video model Experiments show improved object layout/control in single-scene videos vs baselines Multi-scene videos display higher object consistency across scenes compared to baselines Competitive open-domain video generation performance maintained The key innovation seems to be using a large language model to plot detailed video plans to guide overall video generation. And the video generator Layout2Vid adds better spatial and temporal control through some clever tweaks. The separation of these tasks seems to matter. You can read my full summary here. There's a link to the repo there too. Paper link is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

survival analysis in matlab hi everyone one i'm doing a predictive algorithm to find DFS using Cox regression, i first used LASSO regression to select the predictive variables, now i'm using the c-index to evaluate the predictive accuracy, and it's always equals to 1 and I can't understand why(I tried to reduce the numbers of variables just to see if it could change but it didn't change).Also, i'm working on censored date of course. can someone help me understand what I'm doing wrong? submitted by /u/bl4s3159 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

My annotations are in pascal voc format. Below is a calculator I am testing . Not sure if I am calculating the scale and aspect ratios correctly. Please help. import os import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET import numpy as np from sklearn.cluster import KMeans def compute_scales_and_aspect_ratios(directory, n_clusters, img_size): widths = [] heights = [] for filename in os.listdir(directory): if not filename.endswith('.xml'): continue fullname = os.path.join(directory, filename) tree = ET.parse(fullname) root = tree.getroot() for obj in root.iter('object'): xmlbox = obj.find('bndbox') w = float(xmlbox.find('xmax').text) - float(xmlbox.find('xmin').text) h = float(xmlbox.find('ymax').text) - float(xmlbox.find('ymin').text) widths.append(w) heights.append(h) widths = np.array(widths) / img_size[1] # Normalize by image width heights = np.array(heights) / img_size[0] # Normalize by image height scales = np.sqrt(widths * heights).reshape(-1, 1) aspect_ratios = (widths / heights).reshape(-1, 1) kmeans_scales = KMeans(n_clusters=n_clusters, random_state=0).fit(scales) kmeans_aspect_ratios = KMeans(n_clusters=n_clusters, random_state=0).fit(aspect_ratios) return kmeans_scales.cluster_centers_, kmeans_aspect_ratios.cluster_centers_ directory = "path_to_top_folder/batch-1" n_clusters = 5 img_size = (640, 1024) scales, aspect_ratios = compute_scales_and_aspect_ratios(directory, n_clusters, img_size) print('Scales:', scales.flatten()) print('Aspect Ratios:', aspect_ratios.flatten()) ​ submitted by /u/dpadhy [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am looking for training data consisting of children’s stories and associated grade level. Does anyone know of any publicly available or paid datasets like this? submitted by /u/SpellboundLRN [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/cegras [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hello! I'm working on a Tetris AI and am representing the 10x20 grid cubes with a one hot encoded dataset: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/conlan/tetris-training-set-9262023 This means my data has 208 features (200 for the grid cubes being on/off, 7 for the "next shape" box, and 1 for the labeled best move. I currently have 9460 labeled samples and have done some preliminary fitting here: https://www.kaggle.com/code/conlan/tetris-ai?scriptVersionId=144388350 with a highest f1_macro score of 0.431090. Does anyone have suggestions for which direction to take from here to improve? Currently I see: Collect More Data Tune Hyperparameters Rework Features I'm hesitant to rework the features as that would require telling the model more specifics and would like to keep it abstract, but maybe 200 is crazy high? Or maybe <10k samples is too low and I should just keep collecting data? Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/conlanrios [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Paper - https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13734 submitted by /u/MysteryInc152 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

ood morning everyone, I am currently reading the book of Mr. Burkov: Machine Learning Engineering. He talk about a step that might be helpful before training a ML model: Feature Scaling. Furthermore, he adds that before Feature Scaling, you might do Feature Transformation (Log, Square,...) in order to make your data look normal and have better models. How true do you think this statement is? Do you also transform your feature, and then scale them? How often do you do it? It is important for Regression or SVM, but do you do it also for other black box algorithms such as Random Forests? What are the best practices according to you? submitted by /u/dekozr [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

So no discussions are going on about AAAI 2024, or have I just been unable to find any? Opening this regarding Phase 1-2 and Results discussions if anyone wants to discuss. If there already is a thread, share! For an opening question, any idea about what percentages are rejected in desk rejection, phase 1 and finally phase 2? (Roughly of course) submitted by /u/atharvandogra [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

so if u go check the source code for gpt2 u can clearly see that the nrom happens inside the attention and mlp layers. and that the add is separate. this is in the official openai github and is relatively easy to read:https://github.com/openai/gpt-2/blob/master/src/model.py#L123-L130 (thx KingsmanVince) ​ for some reason all the online materials are saying that there is a full norm layer before the mlp instead of inside of it submitted by /u/rejectedlesbian [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Hi, Recently I am trying to reimplement a deep learning based object tracking in C++. However, the whole pipeline involve online training and weight update. Is it possible to do the training for ONNX model and using cuda as accelerator in C++? If yes, then how is the training speed (BP/update)compare to torchlib? I personally strongly prefer onnx, cuz it is much easier to deploy… submitted by /u/Independent_Bet1268 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Mods finally commented The only time that mods were active is when they removed the cat meme. It has been a month since that. Let see what mods have done to improve this sub. Here are some of the other posts obviously rule-breaking or off-topic that mods do NOT remove: A person asking for help with their motherboard A person asking about statistics A person asking for machine learning roadmap Another asking-for-roadmap post ... the list goes on with absolute beginner questions, and low-quality posts. All these posts were written in less than 1 week. As we can see, mods do nothing. They only remove posts that calling out them. Here are posts that people discuss the status of this sub: 17 Sep 2023 2 Sep 2023 1 Aug 2023 Questions for mods: where are you when people complain? Why do you only show up when someone call you out? We have few options: Report the mods and the sub for unmoderated (see this 1 and this 2) Find other communities Gatekeep harder, tell people to go to r/learnmachinelearning r/MLQuestions r/cscareerquestions r/languagetechnology submitted by /u/March8365 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

EDIT: They released the model weights on HF (https://huggingface.co/mistralai) under a Apache 2.0 License. They also updated their website with documentation on how to use/run : https://docs.mistral.ai Note: I am not affiliated with Mistral AI. ​ Via their Twitter X account : magnet:?xt=urn:btih:208b101a0f51514ecf285885a8b0f6fb1a1e4d7d&dn=mistral-7B-v0.1&tr=udp%3A%2F%http://2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=https%3A%2F%http://2Ftracker1.520.jp%3A443%2Fannounce ​ https://preview.redd.it/0o46ls925rqb1.png?width=1306&format=png&auto=webp&s=7ff7ca3a510577e9ecdaa3c9ccb7ef763acc0780 submitted by /u/Fluid-Age-9266 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I am wondering if any one runs into this before, i have finetuned flan-t5-xl for classification task by generating one token from decoder. The finetune process looks OK. I want to convert this into t5 encoder with a head to save memory. I am using huggingface T5ForSequenceClassification. However i am seeing loss not actually decrease but bounce around certain float value. What could be wrong? I have tried a few learning rates and other hyperparameters tuning. submitted by /u/Chen806 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Researchers from Microsoft have just proposed using a psychological assessment tool called the Defining Issues Test (DIT) to evaluate the moral reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) like GPT-3, ChatGPT, etc. The DIT presents moral dilemmas and has subjects rate and rank the importance of various ethical considerations related to the dilemma. It allows quantifying the sophistication of moral thinking through a P-score. In this new paper, the researchers tested prominent LLMs with adapted DIT prompts containing AI-relevant moral scenarios. Key findings: Large models like GPT-3 failed to comprehend prompts and scored near random baseline in moral reasoning. ChatGPT, Text-davinci-003 and GPT-4 showed coherent moral reasoning with above-random P-scores. Surprisingly, the smaller 70B LlamaChat model outscored larger models in its P-score, demonstrating advanced ethics understanding is possible without massive parameters. The models operated mostly at intermediate conventional levels as per Kohlberg's moral development theory. No model exhibited highly mature moral reasoning. I think this is an interesting framework to evaluate and improve LLMs' moral intelligence before deploying them into sensitive real-world environments - to the extent that a model can be said to possess moral intelligence (or, seem to possess it?). Here's a link to my full summary with a lot more background on Kohlberg's model (had to read up on it since I didn't study psych). Full paper is here submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Any good AI (low-hype) newsletters/blogs? That's ideally sent <= 4 times a month? I'm tired of the amount of AI news I have to go through daily just to keep up. submitted by /u/onteri [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

AI-generated deepfake clones of Chinese livestream influencers are becoming popular on e-commerce platforms. These clones can work 24/7 and help brands sell their products without the need for human streamers. Chinese startups and tech companies are offering the service of creating these deepfake avatars for a cost of around $1,000. The technology has evolved over the years, with the need for training videos decreasing from 30 minutes to just one minute. The AI clones can mimic the movements and speech of human streamers, making them an affordable and efficient alternative for smaller brands. Source : https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/19/1079832/chinese-ecommerce-deepfakes-livestream-influencers-ai/ submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Automatic code generation has always been an integral part of programming: compilers, synthesis tools, convertors, etc. are examples of classic code generators. Now, with such powerful LLMs at hand, it is only natural to try to find new ways to generate codes. The question is: are LLMs the right tool for code generation? There are two sides to code generation: (1) understanding the intent (a.k.a. capturing the spec) (2) writing the code. LLMs are great for (1), but not so good for (2). This is an example of using LLM for general-domain code generation: https://github.com/RoboCoachTechnologies/GPT-Synthesizer You can see that the main focus here is to properly capture the spec, and that's where LLMs shine. LLMs solution for a general-domain code generation may not be complete or optimized. It is always easier to break the problem and solve code generation in a specific domain. Here you can see how much better and cleaner the output of code generation can be when it is limited to a specific domain (robotics domain, ROS in particular, in this case): https://github.com/RoboCoachTechnologies/ROScribe What are your thoughts on using LLMs for code generation? submitted by /u/RoboCoachTech [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

submitted by /u/waozen [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

The CIA is developing an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT to help US intelligence agencies sift through large amounts of information. The program will train on publicly available data and provide sources for agents to confirm their validity. The tool will allow agents to look up information, ask follow-up questions, and summarize daunting masses of data. The exact nature of what constitutes 'public data' could spark privacy issues. The tool will be distributed to the 18-agency US intelligence community, but not to lawmakers or the public. Source : https://www.engadget.com/even-the-cia-is-developing-an-ai-chatbot-192358767.html submitted by /u/NuseAI [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

Generating coherent videos spanning multiple scenes from text descriptions poses unique challenges for AI. While recent progress enables creating short clips, smoothly transitioning across diverse events and maintaining continuity remains difficult. A new paper from UNC Chapel Hill proposes VIDEODIRECTORGPT, a two-stage framework attempting to address multi-scene video generation: Here are my highlights from the paper: Two-stage approach: first a language model generates detailed "video plan", then a video generation module renders scenes based on the plan Video plan contains multi-scene descriptions, entities/layouts, backgrounds, consistency groupings - guides downstream video generation Video generation module called Layout2Vid trained on images, adds spatial layout control and cross-scene consistency to existing text-to-video model Experiments show improved object layout/control in single-scene videos vs baselines Multi-scene videos display higher object consistency across scenes compared to baselines Competitive open-domain video generation performance maintained The key innovation seems to be using a large language model to plot detailed video plans to guide overall video generation. And the video generator Layout2Vid adds better spatial and temporal control through some clever tweaks. The separation of these tasks seems to matter. You can read my full summary here. There's a link to the repo there too. Paper link is here. submitted by /u/Successful-Western27 [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

I created this cyberpunk inspired short using Midjourney to create the pictures, RunwayML to animate them, and then edit them together using CapCut on iOS. I know the animation is still in early stages, but what do you think? Do you think we could have full length movies in a couple years? submitted by /u/Exitium_Maximus [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )

How do you evaluate the quality of your prompt outputs? Here's a handy checklist. Let's have a look! You can also join r/PromptWizards to find more tutorials and prompts! Part 1: Understanding AI's Understanding You've presented a prompt to your AI, the next questions are: Has the AI accurately grasped the context? If not, how can I make sure the LLM steers my context better, should I be more direct and clear in my prompt? Can I be less negative (shows to perform less) and be more guiding to the LLM? Do the responses directly address the question or topic? Was my query and task/instruction clearly detailed in enough depth that the LLM understood what I expect? Are there any contradictions between different responses to the same prompt? If I run my prompt multiple times, i…  ( 10 min )

OpenAI's much-touted model GPT-4, lauded for its multimodal abilities, including advanced image recognition, still has significant flaws. These glitches range from inventing facts to misinterpreting chemicals' images and hate symbols, according to a new paper from OpenAI. To stay ahead of AI developments, look here first. https://preview.redd.it/seg5x4zn3uqb1.png?width=1108&format=png&auto=webp&s=635a6c58cf6255f62d8eae3077678864e5b0e248 Unintended GPT-4V behaviors GPT-4V has a tendency to hallucinate or invent facts with unwarranted confidence. The model struggles to make correct inferences, sometimes creating fictional terms by wrongly combining text strings. It misinterprets certain symbols of hate and can give incorrect answers in the context of medical imaging. OpenAI’s mitigation strategies OpenAI has implemented various safeguards to prevent GPT-4V's misuse, such as breaking CAPTCHAs or using images to infer personal details. The company insisted that GPT-4V is not to be used for identifying dangerous chemicals from image structures. OpenAI acknowledged it has a long way to go in refining the model and is working on it. Discrimination and bias When OpenAI’s production safeguards are disabled, GPT-4V displays bias against certain sexes and body types. The paper reported offensive responses related to body positivity when prompted by an image of a woman in a bathing suit. (source) P.S. If you like this kind of analysis, I write a free newsletter that dissects the most impactful AI news and research. 1000s of professionals from Google, Meta, and OpenAI read it daily. submitted by /u/AIsupercharged [link] [comments]  ( 9 min )